Day: October 19, 2000

My Green Lantern Story

Mark Morgan linked to this wonderful site/newspaper column on comic books that I’d never heard of, Captain Comics. Anyway, my wife’s more the comic fanatic (but she reads comics for normal people like Strangers In Paradise), but I’ve got a ton of comics from when I was a kid.

Anyway, the stupidest idea for a comic book hero has to be Green Lantern in my opinion, but for some reason I could never put the stupid books down. I remember being hooked on the Green Lantern/Green Arrow crossover book that DC had going for awhile (leave it to DC to try to color coordinate their superheroes). Anyway the book I really obssessed over (and still do) is Legion of Superheroes, but I’ll always have a love/hate relationships with Green Lantern.

So where’s this going? Somebody wrote in to ask Captain Comic about a collector’s item Green Lantern ring that DC was selling a few years ago. Good luck finding them. But when I was in the comic book shop the other day I noticed they had a life-sized green lantern just like in the books and it was only $250! I’m thinking that would look great next to my desk, but $250 is a lot of money.

Fortunately my wife resolved the dilemma by pointing out that if I spent $250 on a green lantern replica she would change the locks and it and I would have to sleep on the porch, but someday I tell you I will have that green lantern.

My DSL Saga

The last couple days I’ve been working trying to tweak my computers after installing DSL. Compared to a lot of people I’ve read about, I have had an entirely different problem: the DSL works great, Windows still sucks.

I only had one glitch with my DSL install. The technician who modified the phone line also managed to turn off one of my voice lines, which took a couple of days to get repaired. That was it. The actual DSL installation went without a hitch. Hooked the modem up, installed the software, did a few reboots and wow — the speed on this thing is incredible. It’s significantly faster than even my high speed access at work (probably because there’s only one user instead of several thousand sharing a bunch of T1 lines).

The problem I’m having is sharing the connection over my LAN — actually the install pretty much rendered my entire LAN inoperable.

I was going to just plug the DSL output cable into a LinkSys router, but Ameritech got tricky on me. They sent me a USB DSL modem — so rather than having an Ethernet cable going to my computer I have a USB cable. Which is kind of stupid since the USB bandwidth is so limited. It works great on the computer I’ve got it installed in, but only because that computer doesn’t have any other USB devices (I’d probably return it and insist on a different modem if I weren’t leaving in a year or so anyway — too much hassle for the short time left here).

Since a hardware solution isn’t an option, I was trying to configure Windows to handle both the PPP Over Ethernet protocol that the DSL modem uses while still getting the file/print sharing to work. What a pain. Ameritech doesn’t want me to do to this (though it’s not strictly forbidden in my TOS), so they have no helpful hints. I’ve read stuff online from people who have the same modem who have gotten it to work over a LAN but it involves digging deep into Windows networking features, which I’ve never understood very well.

Abusive E-mails

Dave Winer writes about abusive e-mail that he and other people get. Winer says,

A word of encouragement to people who write publicly, passing on something that was said to me a few years ago by a journalist. Look at the Letters to the Editor page in magazines. You’ll see abusive people saying nasty personal things about public writers. This isn’t a new thing. If you go through it, you’ll be a better writer. Not sure if this is true, but mean readers are a fact of life. Email makes communication easier, and that includes abusive communication.

As someone who has worked as a journalist here’s my take: the only way you know you’re having an impact on people is when some of them start sending you hate mail. Ignore it.

Personally, abusive e-mail is pretty easy to deal with. I zap such messages into my archives folder without giving them another thought. Life’s busy enough without having to deal with profanity filled, poorly written rants (legitimate criticism, however, I read carefully).

On the other hand when I wrote for a print newspaper I came home once to find a death threat on my answering machine, and I know other people who had irate readers try to physically intimidate them.

Abusive e-mail is much easier to deal with.

Conversant Newbies Site

Mark Morgan started a Conversant Newbies site the other day which he summarizes as, “A place to put really cool stuff we come up with.”

One of the sort of double-edged swords with Conversant is its incredible flexibility. On the one hand this is astounding because to an extent not possible in any other tools I’ve used, I can build a web solution tailored to how I work and how I want to present information, while Mark or others can do things entirely differently.

On the other hand regardless of how easy it is to use, at some point once you get past a certain level of features, things can get pretty confusing (on the flip side of that, though, given its flexibility it is far easier to keep all of the options of Conversant in my head than it was remember how to configure four or five CGI scripts to do similar functions).

One of the things I’ve been working on, for example, is writing documentation for reguler site visitors who are used to using things like the Ultimate Bulletin Board. In my opinion, writing good software documentation is the most difficult writing task, period.

Power Tripping

An article appeared on UWire today (Sexual assault speaker at U. New Mexico gets cold shoulder from athletes forced to attend) about and power that illustrates the often hypocritical nature of feminist discourse on power relationships. The topic was a sexual assault lecture at the University of New Mexico given by Jessica Weiner, who apparently makes a living doing this sort of thing.

The story made UWire because a large group of athletes were in the audience and were joking and laughing in part because they resented the fact that they were required to attend a lecture which they though would consist mainly of male bashing. The hypocrisy comes in Weiner’s theory of power. According to the UWire story, to illustrate power relationships, Weiner,

Lead[…] the students in a 10-second game of thumb wrestling, Weiner told them that they could get wishes for each win. The students then thumb wrestled with a fury, attempting to beat each other.

After the exercise, she explained the point was to defeat the other person because people want power and success. She said sometimes people see each other as people they can control or overpower, which is where confusion about sex begins.

It is interesting that Weiner sees competition as inherently about control and power, while ignoring the irony that she is lecturing to a captive audience forced to attend her speech by a large academic university which certainly has more power over its students than the thumb wrestlers have over each other.

This is typical of radical feminist, in particular, and Left-wing in general, critiques of power relationships — power is only questionable when its wielded by the other side (men, right wingers, fill in the scapegoat group of the month), whereas it is implicitly benevolent when wielded by feminists.

Source:

Sexual assault speaker at U. New Mexico gets cold shoulder from athletes forced to attend. Angela Williams, UWire Today, October 17, 2000. Originally published in University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, October 17, 2000.