Rob Sterling

I recently installed a piece of open source software called phpGedView. “GEDCOM” is the database tagging system developed a few decades back by the Mormon Church, which is big into genealogy and retroactive baptism of the ancestors of its converts. The phpGedView code base takes existing GEDCOM files and makes them easy to view and edit online, basically allowing a bunch of researchers to work off one file library and saving a lot of confusion and integration problems down the road.

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I love G4 TV. The network recently did a delightful show on how the 1984 E.T. game for the 2600 killed the video game business for ten years. And truth told, I bought a Commodore Vic-20 on the same day E.T. opened, using my snow-shovelling money. (A couple years ago I addressed an internal audience at GMAC and met the father of the Vic-20. That’s a whole ‘nutha story, but it’s worth mentioning that he’s a professor at Wharton. You think any of those Atari guys are teaching at Wharton? Pfah.)

Drawbacks to G4 - Pete Rojas’ hair. I’ve met Pete a couple times. We both set up Calacanis Weblogsinc blogs at about the same time (but people actually read Pete’s and Nick Denton doesn’t hate me, at least not as much). But Pete - get a friggin’ haircut. Please. Please. I can’t look at it anymore. It’s like you have a really bad toupee, except it’s actually your real hair.

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All three of my uncles and my maternal grandfather Harry Ten Broeck made careers of electrical work or electrical engineering. One of my uncles helped build Telsat, and my grandfather installed the electrical conduit that powers the lights atop the Chrysler Building. Harry’s father Charles was a book printer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, like his male descendants he made a career of assembling very small things and ordering them very precisely. Charles’ father Henry was a master cabinet-maker, which is likewise a task of some intricacy, and Henry’s father Peter was a high-end carriage wheelwright, an obsolete career field that combined the worst aspects of geometry, carpentry and the decorative arts, and required an unusual attention to detail. Read more »

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I overheard two guys talking just now and one called the other an “iron”, pronounced “EYE-rahn”. From the context I gleaned that iron is a noun meaning “someone who is trying so hard to be clever that he does something notably stupid.” Simply stated, an ironical moron.

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I’m almost ready to unveil my new project - something that I’ve spent part of July and most of August working on. Just a few more days until the announcement.

I’m desperately hoping this will elevate me at least to the Blogebrity B-List from the lowly depths of the C-List, where I currently reside.

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I just called in and sure enough, I have jury duty again tomorrow. I don’t mind doing it, but what I do mind is that other jurors seem to feel like the trials we’re sitting on are not their concern. Last week I sat on a jury for an armed robbery, and to my mind the defendant was guilty - obviously and profoundly guilty. But the feeling I got from the other jurors is that they didn’t think the matter was really their problem. It happened in a crappy neighborhood, and they didn’t see why they should accept the burden of having to put someone in prison.

It is a burden. If you vote to imprison someone, that’s your burden to carry. You might have been wrong - you’ll never know for sure, and the procedural nature of the courts is such that you’re not getting all the information that the prosecutor, defense attorney and judge have. So you have to live with the knowledge that someone is in a cage because of your decision, for the defense of society.

The man whose trial I sat on was accused of armed robbery, and he was arrested several days following the robbery after having been spotted on the street by the victim, who called the police. The police found the victim’s property - reported stolen and documented in a prior photograph with the victim - in the possession of the defendant. The defendant fled police twice prior to capture and also had cocaine on his person. He had two prior felony convictions and was 23 years old.

So tomorrow I’ll go downtown and probably sit on another jury. If I think the defendant is innocent or if I doubt his guilt in any substantial way, of course I’ll vote to acquit. But if I think he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, lacking videotape evidence of the defendant committing the crime I’m afraid I’ll wind up having to play the role of “asshole who won’t let us go home” for a second time.

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My friend Jeff has had a terrible experience with a Baltimore Subaru dealership. It’s a good read - he’s really pissed off.

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A DJ at the local country music station here in Richmond went a little flaky today and started playing Christmas music.

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I like comics; newspaper comics, comic books, manga, graphic novels, all of it. I especially like comics with a single creator - there’s something pure about seeing words and pictures that come from the same mind, both trying to convey the same concept.

By the time I started reading them, newspaper comics already mostly sucked. Pogo an Li’l Abner had both ceased publication, and a good chunk of the strips in the local paper came out of Mort Walker’s studio, which is a polite way of saying they were crap. I didn’t realize they were crap at the time, having no benchmark for comparison, and the only person who told me they had become crap over time was my grandfather. Since he thought the period from 1920 to 1980 was marked by a general trend of everything turning to crap, I didn’t take his pronouncements on comics too seriously. But he was right about them, and maybe about the rest, too.

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I added one of those fancy new Flickr badges to the right column. Pretty cool idea, and a nice implementation.

Update: I took it out - there’s something wrong with this template. There’s a glitch in the structure and the Flickr badge was making the problem obvious. I might put it back if I can find and eliminate the error. Here’s the badge, though:

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