Funk Babblings

Linux news site LXer has dug up a 1989 article predicting technology in 2001. It's interesting to see where they got things right and where they got things wrong; they seem to overestimate the importance of fax and ISDN, but the ISDN predictions aren't too far from what happened with the Internet.

Turns out that article is on a site (www.AtariMagazines.com) archiving "classic" computer magazines (for Ataris and other 80s computers) such as Antic, Compute!, and Creative Computing, though they don't have my favorite, A.N.A.L.O.G. They're also connected to www.AtariArchives.org, a site archiving the full text of some old Atari books and other resources, many of which I have in my basement along with my 256K Atari 1200XL.

In more current news, the BBC has an article and half-hour RealVideo programme about Google's history and the changes and challenges facing it today.

I know everyone is tired of depressing hurricane talk by now, but I need to get this out before the new news cycle, dominated by the Supreme Court, forgets about New Orleans and the terrible loss of life there.

( Loss of a culture... )

Update: Listen to some of that New Orleans culture over at Live365.
Or check out On The Media and listen to the editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune talk about getting their paper out under these conditions.
Another Update: On being poor.
And Harry Shearer's Le Show does a celebration of New Orleans for his latest show.

So yesterday Debian finally released version 3.1, "Sarge", as a stable release. It's been almost three years since their last stable release. So when someone at Slashdot dared to ask when the next release would be, the response came:

These are some of the things that happened between Debian releases: a) The Olympic games returned to Greece. b) The Pope died. c) A German Pope got elected in a conclave. d) Apple switched to Intel. e) Watergate's Deep Throat identity was revealed. f) The French rejected the European Constitution g) Boston won the World Series. So just sit, be patient and wait for the signals my son.

And all that just happened in the past year!


Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to upgrade some servers for the last time for a while....

The big mystery of my lifetime is no longer a mystery -- the Washington Post has confirmed that W. Mark Felt was Woodward & Bernstein's "Deep Throat" source on the Watergate scandal. At the time, Felt was number-two at the FBI.

The 91-year-old Felt's family revealed the news to Vanity Fair, but I didn't buy into it until the Post confirmed it this afternoon; until now nobody expected the Post to revel Deep Throat's identity until after his death.

The news may be a disappointment to the University of Illinois Department of Journalism, however, since their research convinced them beyond doubt that Fred Fielding was Deep Throat. Fielding was deputy to White House Counsel John Dean in the Nixon administration; after the Post broke the story with Deep Throat's help, Dean famously testified to Congress about what he knew.

Addendum: Nixon himself thought Felt was Deep Throat, and said so on his famous Oval Office tapes. Some kid who went to summer camp with Bernstein's son did too and in 1999 had some wordplay to prove it. The Washingtonian thought it was Felt back in 1974, and continued to think so in 2002. For other pre-2005 references to Felt as a top Deep Throat candidate, see this 1992 Atlantic story, and Slate's 1999 and 2002 coverage.

I'm currently reading The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, by Ronald Hutton. I finished chapter five last night, and so far the book is fascinating (though the small print is a bit scary at first). It's useful for getting insight into the various worldviews and structures that went into the creation of Wicca (at least Gardner's brand of it).
( Read more... )

It seems that in high school in the early 60s, John Kerry played bass in a rock band, The Electras, and they released a 13-song record (making 500 copies). Now that record has been dug up and released on CD.
http://kerryrocks.com/
http://www.TheElectrasRockandRollBand.com/

There are a couple of mp3s available for sampling bits and pieces of the album. Sounds to me like fairly typical uninspiring surf-inspired early 60s music, but rather amusing and interesting nonetheless.