Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Today is my father's Birthday. As a present to him, I'm publishing, on the Internet, a children's book that he wrote 30 years ago.

The book is The Pickle Machine and the author is Ken Wood. It's one of three children's books that he wrote when I was a child. He sent them to several publishing houses, with no luck.

Decades later, I read the books to my kids. Their grandfather takes great delight in that!

So now as a way for other kids to appreciate this cute story, I scanned the pages and color-corrected to compensate for the yellowing paper, typed in the text, and formatted it somewhat like a small book.

So ... if you have kids, it might be worth a couple of minutes to download the PDF. Get it from this page.

It's not like it's in bookstores, but it might give a few kids a few smiles. If you like it, drop me a line so I'll be encouraged to scan his other two titles.... And if you can think of any other places from which to link to its page, please let me know.

Being in the computer industry, you would think that I am a big fan of electronic and computer innovations. For the most part, that's absolutely true — but one place where I don't think we are ready yet is electronic voting. The systems are incredibly insecure, subject to tampering, and completely unverifiable. I want my vote to be counted, to be counted correctly, to be counted accurately, and to, if needed, be re-counted. The current electronic voting systems in use now have problems with all of these issues. I have serious doubts if my votes and my wife's votes were counted in the 2002 election.

So in California, I heard on the news this morning that the Secretary of State is going to be making his decision in a few days about whether to decertify certain voting machines in some counties that had some problems. But that's not enough ... they ALL need to go.

If you agree, please contact the Secretary of State's office — I just did, and spoke to a nice receptionist who diligently wrote down my comments. Their number is (916) 657-2166. And do it soon; apparently the decision is happening soon.

(For readers inside or outside of California, here's a link to check out: verifiedvoting.org.)

Pledge to vote on November 2nd, and get a free iTunes song --- but hurry if you want the song!!

... here's a link roundup, where I go over some interesting Web sites I've run across. All muddled together for your inconvenience.

Got too much money? Buy the Gucci iPod case! · Software coming soon: Delicious Monster · The singer/songwriter who lives just around the corner : Paul Manousos · My house is pictured on their home page: Quality Shingle Work · Get your team jerseys here: Clothing of the American Mind · Some people are way too creative: How Mr. and Ms. Pacman reproduce · What to do with your MP3s: Send them back! · I agree with this rant: Acres, Miles, and Football Fields · Bare Bones Software, you could be next: NPR can't say 'suck' on the air · A new home for 'Bush in 30 Seconds' commercials — but they need more web space: The BI30 Archive Project · Never use a big word when you can use a diminutive one: The Longest Words in English

South Africa has just celebrated 10 years of democracy. It seems like just yesterday that I first heard about this atrocity that was taking place on the other side of the world.

Coincidentally, I ran across a couple of interesting chilling numbers a few days ago:

How very, very sad. America is the new South Africa; the new U.S.S.R.

Sources: US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prison Policy Initiative, "The International Use of Incarceration" by Marc Mauer, The Sentencing Project, via This magazine, via Utne magazine.

I've just been reading that there is genocide going on in Sudan. And under international agreement, a nation must intervene to stop a genocide when it is officially acknowledged,

Our government has been focusing a lot of "liberating" Iraq so maybe it's time to step up to the plate, officially acknowledge what is going on, and liberate Sudan.

The new website, PassionOfThePresent, tracks the effort to stop genocide. It has suggestions on what we ordinary people can do — like contact our Representatives and Senators and ask them to support H. Con. Res. 403 [House] and S. Con. Res 99 [Senate &mdash currently sponsored by Lieberman (D-CT), Durbin (D-IL), Brownback (R-Kansas), Kennedy (D-MA), and Feingold (D-WI)]. I'm going to contact my representatives shortly.

The site also has an RSS feed. Let's spread the word!

Today, two Watson tools were updated ... one a major update and the other a minor one.

• The Movies tool had to be significantly rebuilt, as MovieFone.com — now part of AOL — changed their formatting.
• The Translation tool was tweaked to fix issues with Babelfish and Freetranslation.

I just learned that today is officially Earth Day. So Happy Earth Day to You .... if it's possible to be happy with what is going on these days.

I've considered myself an environmentalist ever since some classes I took at college. For a long time now I've put that into personal action: biking or walking instead of driving when possible, bringing canvas bags to the grocery store, using a Mac instead of a PC, and so forth.

Now I have 2.0 kids, and I think about what kind of Earth we are leaving behind for the next generation. And it's not looking pretty, literally. It seems that all of the strides that have been made in environmental protection in the last hundred years — since Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican, BTW) started placing lands under federal protection — are being dismantled by our current Presidential administration. One by one, laws that protect our environment are now being dismantled, while the public is fed Orwellian terms like Clear Skies Initiative that actually allow increases in pollution.

So ... do something today to celebrate Earth Day. Read this Salon interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (about to be interviewed on Air America), and pass it along to others: <http://tinyurl.com/34wsd> Start up some new habits that will leave the Earth in better condition than it was when you got here. But most importantly, do whatever you can to make sure that George W. Bush is not re-selected President. I'm not a big fan of his presumptive opponent Kerry, but anybody would be better than what the Bush administration is doing now.

When Safari requests a Web page, it nicely uses your language preferences that you set in System Preferences, which is what you would expect. Here's something strange that I stumbled upon — for some reason, Safari always adds Japanese to the list of languages you accept (in the "Accept-Language" header), whether it is on your list of languages or not. Why?

I'm not the only one to notice this. In any case, I've reported it as a bug.

Watson Updates today:

• eBay: Continuing the game of catch-up. More tweaks to react to changes on their Web site.
• TV: Some fixes to restore additional listings
• Translation: Fixes to Babelfish and FreeTranslation modules

Watson's eBay tool got another update today to catch up with server-side changes. So what else is new? :-)

I'm listening to the inchoate radio network, Air America Radio, over their Internet feed. After a bunch of technical problems with the stream yesterday, it seems to be pretty stable today. (Terry has some tips for Mac OS X users here.)

Wow, some really heavy-hitter guests they have had so far! How refreshing to be hearing radio that is not steeped in ultra-conservatism. The ads are, of course, as obnoxious as on any AM station! But for the American majority, who aren't fan's of the neocon agenda — whether it be confirmed Democrats, stepping-stone democrats, Republicans who feel that Bush has gone too far — you should check this out.

Still, it is not without its shortcomings. Randi Rhodes has some good things to say, but in some interaction with callers, she sounds as pig-headed as Rush Limbaugh. And I agree with Doc Searls' assessment [updated link] assessment that they really need to take advantage of the Internet:

[G]et out of the media mentality of old radio. Don't try to beat right wing radio at its own game. Start a new one.

Deep down in the core of Watson, along with tons of other Mac applications that connect to the Internet (Aizai, Spring, Konfabulator, Comictastic, Pod2Go, PodNews 3, Suck it Down , HenWen, PhotoStickies, MakingMusic, EarthLink TotalAccess 2004, devPush, iScrobbler, WuffCam, iConquer 2, pMpost, Dejal Simon, MailPictures, Babelizer, and probably more) is an open-source piece of Cocoa code called CURLHandle, which is itself a wrapper around the open-source library, curl, that handles connections to the Internet.

And today ... again, no kidding! ... I've released version 1.9 of CURLHandle. If there are any Cocoa developers who want to utilize curl's functionality, this may be of use to you. Of course, this class was originally built during Watson's development timeframe back in the days of Mac OS X 10.0, when Cocoa didn't provide enough for what Watson needed. Apple has since improved their story, so new software development can probably use Apple's toolkit rather than CURLHandle. Still, CURLHandle may have life in it yet....

For those who like to keep track of what minor Watson updates happen, this post is for you! And even though this is April 1st, this is actually true ... no kidding! (Though if I were kidding, I would not be saying that I were kidding; isn't that mind-blowing?)

So, if you are still reading this, you will be happy to know of these updates:

• eBay: Fixed some broken searches (general and by-seller)
• Phone: Fixed some broken searches (US businesses)