ztraffer

I hope you were able to join the global campfire, a day when we got together to contemplate that peace is more than just hope.

Do you remeber Internet Time ? It was intended to eliminate the hassle of time zones, as real time interactions across time zones started to raise dramatically. No matter where you are, or what time scheme is in place, everyone shares the same exact time. Under Internet Time, the day was divided into 1000 units (beats), starting at midnight European Central Time. It came out right after the internet boom, and it seemed like an awesome idea (at least to me) -if you've ever tried to coordinate an activity with someone in a different part of the world, you've surely gone through something like this: A: OK, how does tomorrow at 10 AM work for you? B: 10 AM your time or my time? A: My time B: You are US Pacific, right? A: Yes. B: OK, you're 8 hrs behind me so that's 18:00 my time A: Is that military time? I'm not sure... B: Right, sorry -that's 6pm. A: Are you sure, we're on daylight savings time here B: All right, why don't we set up the meeting on Outlook, ...

Today , the life of Netscape Navigator oficially comes to an end. This posting is my tribute to this icon of the internet's dawn. Though its real death came about in the late 90s, after loosing the browser wars to Microsoft's IE, it was given a new lease in life when it was acquired by AOL, though its market share continued to decline, and faded into irrelevance at the turn of the millenium. While Netscape was a better browser in the beginning, IE's eventual superiority became irrelevant in the face of its strategic advantage: IE was pre-installed on all new Windows PCs. In the early years of the web, Netscape soon attained dominance over Mosaic, and was the first browser for most people back then. For those of us who lived immersed in the emerging web, it was like exploring a new world. There were no commercial websites, just individual pages with all kinds of weird content. Forget about media-rich pages, with neatly laid-out content designed by web-design firms. Back the...

I could not let today pass without a posting to mark the event. Happy February 29th, world!

The combination of two events -a total lunar eclipse, and a clear night sky (in Seattle both are quite rare) prompted me to go out and document the occasion. I could see a lot of detail with my binoculars, and managed to take a few photos and video, but most of the detail was lost. Unlike solar eclipses, lunar ones aren't particularly spectacular. The Moon does not go completely dark, but acquires a redish hue. While Earth does block all direct sunlight to the Moon, some is refracted through Earth's atmosphere, the blue portion of the spectrum being absorbed in the process -just like at sunset, when sunlight paints everything red. I wonder how it looked like from the Moon. I imagine the Earth slowly blocking the Sun, its black circumference bordered by a red-gold ring of glowing atmosphere... but that of course, would be a solar eclipse.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the democratic party presidential caucuses -where voters have the opportunity to vote for their choice of nominee. I almost didn't make it, but I am glad I did. The caucus location was -a very large room at a highschool- filled to capacity; but more than that, the crowd seemed to be humming with a kind of electricity. After speaking with several caucuses veterans, my impression that this caucus had attracted much larger crowds than usual was confirmed. For starters, for the first time in US history, a candidate that is not a white male has a serious chance of becoming president. Add to that the fact that a large part of the population is desperate for change -even on the republican side, those who supported the current administration are fed up with it, according to the polls. This could explain, at least in part, why McCain -the most anti-establishmentarian force within his party- has become the republican front runner in spite the hostility of th...