There’s something about how these Canadians eat that really appeals to me. I figure a similar approach in the Washington, DC area would probably require until 2074.

According to the BBC, 200 million blogs were abandoned last year. I wonder if I was included.

Also reported that in the UK, flushing costs 1.5p. Since that’s used, on average, to discard 1.0p, I deduce that Britain has a 50% p surcharge.

Hide the kids, then set Tickle Me Elmo ablaze.

Interesting article from the Denver Post about snow science. But what I really liked about it was my misreading of one phrase:

“Once it gets packed down, it’s hard to peel it up with a plow blade,” he said. So in addition to plows Tuesday, Denver sent ninth graders and seven front-end loaders onto city streets to slowly scrape up packed ice, Kennedy said.

Actually, the article said nine graders. But high school kids would probably be cheaper.

Both quotes from the Washington Post:

In Crawford, Tex., President Bush said in a statement, “This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.”

Street violence continued in Iraq with a string of lethal car bombings Saturday. About three hours after the execution, 34 were killed and 58 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a market place in Kufa, a Shiite city near Najaf. Later, 25 people were killed and 65 injured when two car bombs went off in the mostly-Shiite Huriiya area of Baghdad, according to a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Two other cars blew up, one in the mixed -neighborhood of Dora and one in the mostly-Sunni Sulaikh neighborhood, but information about casualties was not immediately available. It was not clear whether the bombing was in response to Hussein’s execution.

When car bombings and 59+ casualties are such a part of the daily landscape that you’re not sure whether Saddam’s hanging had anything to do with it, I suspect paeans to the rule of law are a bit premature.

Rounding out with some Harpers-style statistics:

Number of Iraqi deaths for which Saddam was found guilty and hanged: 148

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths currently tabulated by Iraq Body Count: 52,139-57,707

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed by Saddam in atrocities trials that are now cancelled: “hundreds of thousands”

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed in post-Saddam Iraq, according to the Lancet, in the past four years: “We are quite confident that there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher.”

But never mind that. Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.

On the last version of this site, I had a tagline that read “sporadically ignored since 1997.” See, this is what I meant. Only thing I’ve posted recently was that Christmas item that I teed up in June. Let’s see if we can’t make 2007 a bit more prolific.

I just watched the Steve Jobs presentation on the new iPods and iTV, and had a terrifying moment near the end. Jobs started running through a list of places Apple connects to:

and for a terrifying moment, I thought the extra space was so he could announce “one more thing” about how Apple was going to be in your bedroom. One can only imagine….

Apologies to Brian if he was going to publish this first…. This is ostensibly the mural on the ceiling in a smoking lounge somewhere. If it’s Photoshopped, it should be the mural on a ceiling in a smoking lounge somewhere.

This teddy bear is a vicious killer.

Newsweek demonstrates some interesting editorial choices in their American and international editions.

iRhythmia n.

The momentary confusion experienced when someone else is headbopping to the music on his headphones, at a completely different cadence than the music you are listening to on yours.

See also, antonym: eMPathree, the sudden realization that the person who has been headbopping to the exact cadence of your music for the last five minutes is not actually listening to it.

When I was a kid, I was taught that you always want to beat your eggs with a fork held parallel to the bowl, with a rapid circular motion. This way, you get more air into the eggs and your result will be more fluffy.

So I’m thinking this method will make the fluffiest damn omelette in human history.

Hat tip to Brian Greenberg on this celeb face-matching site. I ran my own photo, and would have given props to the site had it matched me with Robert Downey, Jr., whom I’ve been mistaken for. No dice.

No, instead, the celebrity I resemble most is: Robin Gibb. You in the back, stop snickering. Coming in second is Larry King, who I think bears a terrifying resemblance to my father, so I guess the site scores points there.

Third, Oliver Stone. Is this thing matching faces or politics?

Fourth and fifth, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO, and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, president of Denmark. Ooookaaaayyyy.

Sixth, Clark Gable. Now we’re talking.

Seventh through tenth… are you sitting down? Marilyn Manson, Dizzy Gillespie, Yogi Berra, and Deborah Kerr. No, I am not making this up.

Kevin Poulsen at Wired News posts a wrap-up on what’s known about the AT&T wiretaps, and demonstrates the lie as to why this isn’t just targeting the suspected terrorists.

Also of note, pointing out what domains in a traceroute indicate that you might be getting sucked into the NSA data maw. I just ran a check from my Comcast cable hookup to Google, and yup, I have to cross an AT&T network to get there.

You can reach me by email at pager@jeffporten.com. Needless to say, this is not my real email address and is subject to change at any time.

Or by phone (this service will call the phone number you provide and connect you to me or my voicemail):

Thanks for stopping by for a visit. I’m Jeff Porten; on various days of the week, I’m an Internet/Macintosh/business development consultant, database and web developer, writer, and entrepreneur.

Most of my consulting work these days is for the Association of Research Libraries and the Coalition for Networked Information. Over there we work with CommuniGate Pro, Apache, QuickDNS, and FileMaker Pro, all running on a fleet of Mac OS X Servers.

The rest of my client base is almost entirely small business and nonprofit, with a smattering of governmental. They are centered in Washington DC, but I keep a global footprint and work hours to match, with active and past projects in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. Australia, give me a call.

I am an incurable serial entrepreneur, so I usually have a half-dozen ideas that I am percolating, incubating, and procrastinating. The most active of these is Plenarcast, a startup that provides Internet broadcasts of conferences and events. That business is run on WebCrossing 5.0 on a BSD Unix system for the live site, and on Macintosh OS X for development purposes. I’ll announce my other ventures here if and when they’re ready for prime time; unfortunately, many of them go the way of DC3Wireless, the brilliant wireless Internet idea that was shelved when T-Mobile announced they were outspending us by 100,000 to 1.

I was recently the CTO of a business that provided grassroots communications to Congress for the members of various businesses and nonprofits. That business, unfortunately, became a dot-com flameout, but I have retained the rights to the entire system, so contact me if you think you can put it to use. That was built using 4D and WS4D, with mailing list services under LetterRip Pro and SIMS.

I wrote a book a few years ago, and keep meaning to write a few more.

The family business is a candy store catering to diabetics. We didn’t have the time to process web orders, so the retail storefront is now offline, but you can still visit our bricks and mortar. That site was running on WebStar, FileMaker Pro, SIMS, and a few other software widgets, last time it was up.

Welcome to jeffporten.com 5.0, inaugurated in February, 2006. I’ve moved the site to WordPress, and with new software comes some new features and reorganization, if you were used to the old site.

The Blogs Formerly Known As “Portentia” and “Jeff Wing Conspiracy” have been combined. Actually, pretty much everything is now a single feed on the home page; I’m going to use WordPress categories to subdivide what I’m writing about rather than send them out on different blogs.

If you’re here just for one particular topic (i.e., you want to read me on security issues, but don’t care about Macintosh software), then feel free to bookmark me by category rather than by my home page. I’ll be looking into whether I can similarly set up multiple RSS feeds by category.

Main sections of jp.com 5.0:

About Jeff Porten: more about me, including my consulting work, professional background, and nonprofit activism.

About this site: you’re here already.

Friends of Jeff: people I know, what they do, and why you should read their websites.

Portentia: essays and other long-form pieces I have posted to my website (as opposed to quick blurbs and blogging).

Software: shareware and freeware I’ve written, demos, and technique discussions.

Jeff Wing Factions (AKA blog categories):

Americana: American history, sociology and culture.

Beltway: Washington political issues, focusing on legislation and policy.

Free Agent Nation: ruminations on self-employment, entrepreneurship, writing, and blood donation.

Inside Draws: talk of odds, gamblers, very odd gamblers, and Hold ‘Em.

Mac Guru: important things to know about the Macintosh.

Media Diet: books I’m procrastinating, movies I want to see, TV I’ve missed. Commentary on specific media artifacts (as opposed to the media at large; see Vox Populi).

Nomadism: places I’ve been, places where I am, travel issues in general.

Photoblog: I see something that amuses me, I take its picture.

Preambling: Discussions relating to providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty. With occasional footnotes about elbow room.

Quotable: a while ago, this was its own blog. Here mostly for legacy purposes.

Red and Blue: my ongoing debates with Brian Greenberg.

Technobabble and Ubergeek: science and technology issues. Computer stuff that isn’t Macintosh-related. Technobabble is meant for the layperson; Ubergeek goes into programming techniques and more technical detail.

Vox Populi: big picture issues relating to democracy, the media, communications, and politics.

Whimsy: if I thought it was funny, it’s here.