journal features

etherlabs.net might be homeless

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2003.11.10

Ken informs me that the continued cost of keeping etherlabs.net online is becoming too much. I'm looking into places where I can keep my site hosted, cheaply. None of them, of course, will be able to provide the database software I use to run this thing. So I'll have to rewrite everything to use flat files.

Dangit, just when the photo management tool was getting to be useful! Now all of it - the movies, the journal, the reader comments, the photos (oh the photos) all of it will be run without a database. Sniff! I guess this is also the death of the spammer's file. No more 100-new-addresses-per day.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton