DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Adbusters’ Corporate America Flag campaign proclaims:

Corporate America is revelling in a Golden Age. A shrinking number of the planet’s biggest businesses — AOL Time Warner, Shell, Nike, Microsoft, McDonald’s — are the money behind presidents, the power that drives global trade rules, the voice of authority on how we live and the way we think. Corporations have all the rights of we, the people, but thousands of times more money to make the system work for them.

We call this system “democracy.” But today it looks a lot like corporate rule.

Click the flag to read more, or to see the full-size “brands and bands” version of the “stars and stripes.” It’s art, and it’s subversive. Sometimes that’s a good combination.

Quiz for the day: how many logos can you name? I recognized 83.5% (25 of 30). If you watch television, you’ll probably recognize more than I did.

The Adbusters site offers a high-res PDF version of the image, so you can print your own. Or, order a 5'' x 3'' polyester flag, suitable for flying in the face of corporate america.

Here’s a trio of eco-disasters taken from one day’s headlines. President Bush appears to be determined to poison as many of us as he can. I’m not real sure what the benefit is, to him or anyone. Maybe that’s why politics make me ill.

Coal-fired power plants’ upgrade provision to die; Utilities expected to save billions on anti-pollution devices

The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries to upgrade their facilities without having to install costly anti-pollution equipment, as they now must do.

Bush official rallies support for logging legislation at Sonora summit

President Bush’s agriculture undersecretary came to California timber country Friday to rally support for legislation that would ease logging restrictions in the name of fire protection and forest health.

EPA misled public on 9/11 pollution; White House ordered false assurances on air quality, report says

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available…
[S]ome of the [EPA]’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

Or, in short, Bush is saying: you’ll have dirtier air, fewer trees to clean it, and we’ll lie to you about how sick you’ll get as a result.

We’re live on the new server. Argh. We’re working out the kinks, slowly.

Not 12 hours after I posted an item in this space about how DSL sucks because the hardware freezes up every few weeks, requiring me to drive across town to do a manual reset… my DSL modem froze up, requiring me to drive across town at 10:30 PM to do a manual reset.

No, I was not pleased.

This site has been hosted on a consumer DSL line for the past year or so. I’m happy and relieved to say that that will soon change.

DSL is a great enduser technology. But it’s a lousy hosting solution. The upstream bandwidth, which is the only direction that matters for serving a website, is limited to 128 kb/sec. DSL’s great downstream bandwidth is 99% idle in this situation.

The bigger problem is the hardware. My Alcatel DSL modem has locked up a half-dozen times over the past year. The only solution is to drive across town and power-cycle it. (No, this DSL line isn’t at my house, but in the closet of a building down the block from the phone company’s central office.)

In June, the modem puked when I was out of town. My server was offline for 12 hours. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I did. So did my father, who called me in Oregon to ask why he couldn’t download his email.

On Monday I installed a rackmount 1U server in a local colocation facility. I’d spent much of the previous week configuring software. My evenings since then have been dedicated to transferring DNS and other services. I’ll start migrating websites tomorrow, and finish over the weekend.

The new server is a powerhouse: 2.8 GHz “hyperthreading” P4 with the new 800 MHz bus… 2 10k RPM Ultra-320 SCSI drives in RAID-1… in a case 1.75'' tall with sliding rails mounted to the sides. The blowers on this thing sound like Discount Rinse Day at the hair salon. When I had the server running in my office, I couldn’t talk on the telephone; even with my headset, the fans were too loud.

Sound doesn’t matter in the colo, of course. My server joined countless noisy others, each in its 1.75'' slot, anonymously stacked like the gel pods in the Matrix. Just add a few lightening bolts and you’d have, well… lots of dead servers. Bad analogy. Never mind.

The point is, updates are likely to continue being sporadic.