Thanks Time Warner Cable!

For three years I have been able to login to my webhost over ssh without a problem.
Now that Time Warner Cable has swooped in and bought Comcast, I can no longer connect to my server.
Earlier this week I couldn’t send SMTP mail. Hopefully the current problem is just a temporary glitch.
(Time Warner Cable technical support doesn’t seem to understand the concept of an “internet connection” as anything more than a web browser and email.)

ISEA 2006 — Jour quatre

Things are winding up — or winding down, depending on how you look at it. There is going to be a summary later this afternoon, and then I think a summary of the summary after that.
The wife and child and I are off, however, for the journey back home.

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ISEA 2006 — Edge Conditions

Written on the wall:

Cutting edge, bleeding edge, leading edge. These are all familiar catch-phrases that suggest we are glimpsing the future of contemporary art, today. Edge Conditions, however, is most emphatically not about the “next new thing.” It presents works of art in a different context, at the intersection of creativity, choice, and what might be called “technology” but what is arguably the world we live in, whether it is devices such as pencils and chisels, or ubiquitous aspects of modern life such as electronics, phones, or computers and the Internet, technology is simply a set of tools that is more less familiar at any given time.

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ISEA 2006 — $.25 a minute

I found a F-dEx/K-nk-s where I can access the internet for 25 cents a minute. I can also use M-cros-ft Office. Even at today’s prices, that is more expensive than gasoline (unless you are going a steady 60mph in an SUV with 12mpg).
Late in the afternoon I spent about an hour at the San Jose Museum of Art. On the ground floor is a retrospecive of light-based works by Jennifer Steinkamp. It had been a few years since I last saw one of her installations, so it was nice to see some of the work I had missed. However with so many pieces it is hard to spend time contemplating each one individually.

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ISEA 2006 — Information design

There are some serious problems with information design here. Part of the problem is that the ISEA program is localized for a specific audience, alongside the larger and more public aspect of the ZeroOne San Jose festival.

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ISEA 2006 — Second Class Citizen

[Save early, save often]
It is around seven pm, and although there are still some ongoing events I am pretty much done with day one of ISEA.
Without a laptop and a WiFi connection II am pretty much a second class citizen here. There are a number of projects which require either an internet connection, a mobile phone, or a bluetooth device to fully engage the work.

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podcasting with Movable Type

I’ve been fooling around with using Movable Type to generate a podcast feed. (Are people still using pre-3.0 versions of MT? I am.) First I took an RSS 2.0 template (here’s one). Then I added some “enclosure” bits. But an enclosure wants to provide a “length” field (the file size), so I hacked up a quick MT plugin:

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PIGGRASH 2005 part 3

I have developed a theory about the exhibition floor at SIGGRAPH: The quality of exhibition booths is inversely proportional to the density of book publisher booths. Because the number of publishers stays relatively constant from year to year (publishing is a slowly growing industry), a lower density means more non-publisher booths overall. For example, last year the publisher density was higher, because the overall exhibition was smaller.

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SIGGARPH2005 part 2

Tuesday night there was a presentation by Side Effects Software (makers of Houdini) at Union Station. Free t-shirts were promised, followed by a party with free drinks til late. Getting to the party involved waiting 45 minutes in line with a thousand people, while they check IDs. Once inside, there were four bars serving the drinks, each with 30 or 40 people waiting in line to get drinks (for themselves and three of their friends). At this point I hear someone proclaim: “This is the best party I’ve been to in a long time.” Oh, did I mention there were some tacky go-go dancers off to the side of the main room? So if mobs are your thing, you would have enjoyed the party.

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SIGPARGH2005 day 1

The internet ghetto is located in the far right corner of the registration area. Some 30 desktops sit on standing height podiums, with no chairs. The desktops are on the floor, such that if you were to move your feet too close to the power switch, you might accidentally kick the machine and hit the power switch, losing whatever you had been working on. Now I have to rewrite this.
So I’m sitting on the floor with my pda and folding keyboard. My laptop died earlier this spring. My pda is wireless-less, so I’ll have to upload this later this evening.

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