Least important question of the day:

On my flight out to San Francisco, the woman next to me ordered bloody mary mix and added vodka from a little airline bottle that she’d brought with her. The attendant not so nicely told her that she’s not allowed to bring her own alcohol onto the plane.

Can the airlies really do that? Is that legal of them? I say this as someone who’s been known to smuggle a box of candy into a movie theater. (And if that turns out to be the reason I burn in Hell for all eternity, I will really kick myself.)

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A bunch of the interviews I did at Supernova are posted on the site, including (in random order): Kevin Marks on Net neutrality, hans Peter Brondmo of Plum, Jann Jennick of imeem, Rohit Kahre and Tantek Ccedil;elik on microformats … and there seems to be a problem with the page at the moment. More will be posted soon. [Tags: supernova]

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I’ve been working for months, on and off (mainly off, occasionally on), trying to get MythTV — Open Source TiVo — working. Bit by bit, I’m making progress. (I should note that for some people – better people than I – MythTV simply installs and runs.)

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that’s about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you’ve given your sister boils for seven years.

Nevertheless, progress has been made, including last night when I actually got the Linux box to output to the TV. Rather than having to watch TV on the computer screen, I could actually watch on my TV. Woohoo! Of course, I don’t yet have sound, the IR Blaster required to control the cable box still doesn’t work unless you shell out of MythTV and give it a raw Linux abracadabra, and it doesn’t record the shows you’ve told it to record. (I’m guessing that that last problem has to do with how I’ve set up Zap2It, the publicly-available channel guide.) One step at a time, my friend, one step at a time.

Last night’s breakthrough in getting “tv out,” as it’s called, was achieved by following instructions at WriteMe. I have a Hauppauge PVR-350 card, so I was able to take the instructions verbatim, especially when it came to the lines updating /etc/modules.conf. (If you use KnoppMyth to install MythTV, as I did and which I recommend, you’ll want to brush up on your vi, since that’s the only text editor it comes with, at least AFAIK.) And before you do anything else, make sure that within the MythTV graphical interface, you’ve gone to the TV setup page and have clicked the box saying that you want the video card to output to the TV. Not that anyone would be foolish enough to miss that step and then spend hours cursing MythTV, Linux, Open Source, and the post-Industrial Age.

Now that Congress is about to reinstate the Broadcast Flag, requiring digital hardware to prevent the unlicensed copying of digital content — i.e., you can’t record a frame of the Simpsons unless The Man lets you, and you may not, by the force of law, skip over the commercials (no kidding) — MythTV is a better idea than ever. Plus, once it’s up and running, you have free TiVo with all the innovations that clever hackers can devise. It’s TiVo with a future. Reclaim your eyeballs! [Tags: mythtv]

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This is from the weekly roundup of new stuff from Berkman fellows:

* Ethan Zuckerman questions coverage of Internet filtering in Africa.

* Derek Bambauer praises the virtues of inefficiency.

* Bill McGeveran provides background to the Science Commons Addenda.

* Dan Gillmor questions the Sharesleuth.com statement of intent.

* Rebecca MacKinnon digs into corporate filtering differences in China.

There’s lots going on at the ol’ Center… [Tags: berkman ethan_zuckerman dan_gillmor bill_mcgeveran rebecca_mackinnon derek_bambauer africa china yahoo science]

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I’ve created a versiion of this blog for viewing on mobile devices: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/johomobile.html. It’s just another Movable Type template with a whole bunch of stuff removed. Because there’s no left sidebar, the posts come to the top of the page. If you have suggestions for making it better…

By the way, the script I was using that displays a link to the posts if your screen is small works fine on large screens where it’s not needed but doesn’t work on my Blackberry; the Blackberry browser seems not to evaluate the “if (screen.width < 201 )" command. But, now I don't need it because I have the separate template.

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Warning!!!! SPOILER. Sort of. I don’t actually give away the ending, but if you haven’t seen it, don’t read this post beforehand because I talk about it in general terms and mention some possible endings that didn’t happen. On the other hand, you should feel free to read my predictions from before the start of the season. You’ll be amazed at my prescience. Hahaha.)

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The finale makes total sense if you assume that The Sopranos is a comedy. Not just sometimes funny. A comedy. A dark comedy. It has always had a comic structure – we see through the characters’ pretensions – and over the seasons it has generally moved toward being a comedy in substance as well.

That’s not to say that Adriana’s murder was hilarious. And the Big Pussy storyline had the inevitability of tragedy. But the overall premise of the show is explicitly about incongruities — a mobster family with the usual suburban problems, except instead of Timmy hiding the broken vase under the couch, Timmy shoots his babysitter in the head and buries her in five locations. The eruptions of brutal violence are not funny, but they are all the more overwhelming because they happen within a comic framework.

The characters are almost all comic. Tony. Artie. Paulie. Silvio. Janice. Dr. Kupferberg. Ralphie. Steve Buscemi’s Tony. Johnny Sack. Tony’s mother. These are great comic turns, transcendently written and acted. Carmela, on the other hand, is pulled between her desire to have a normal, happy family and her recognition that her family life is built on abnormal evil; her reconciliation with Tony was, I thought, tragic. (Melfi is resolutely non-comic, which maybe explains why she’s one of my least favorite characters.)

So, I imagine the writers sitting around trying to figure out what to do with this semi-last season. They want to give Tony some peace. So, they shoot him in the gut as a way of clearing his head. If Tony is given a second chance, how much of the value in his life will he be able to see? How soft can Tony go? Then we had the Vito story line, which was pure comedy. (And more, of course, because it’s the Sopranos.) “I wonder what would happen if we put one of these guys into a sleepy New England town,” said one writer. “Yeah, and made him gay,” said another. “And can we work the word ‘johnnycakes’ into it somehow?” wondered a third. (This entire conversation would have happened entirely in David Chase’s head.)

And then the writers tried to figure out what ending would shock us. Tony kills Carmela? AJ gets whacked? Furio strangles Tony with his pony tail? Paulie Walnuts is appointed head of FEMA? What final scene would we not be ready for?

When they hit on the idea they went with, the writers must have had a good laugh.

I thought it worked. [Tags: sopranos tv entertainment]

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Brad of BradSucks.net set up GoALGORE.org with a WordPress installation. (It may not be reachable by you yet – GoALGORE.org is working for me at the moment but not GoALGORE.com.) Now all we need to do is set it up with content so powerful that Gore takes one look at it and decides he has to run.

Maybe it should be a site where people can post their reasons for wanting Gore to run, with links to resources, etc. Anyone want to take this on? Or do you have a better idea? (I’m in the middle of book stuff and can’t get to site-building right now, even if I had any good ideas.) [Tags: goalgore al_gore politics]

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My switch from a tables-based layout to CSS has worked pretty well in Firefox but in Internet Explorer 6.0 the entire right-hand column is missingpushed down the page. Hmm. I’m stumped. But it doesn’t take much to stump me.

[Note: The following problem was fixed, thanks to Yaron’s comment, below.] Plus, in both Firefox and IE, clicking on the “archive” or “search” link right below the “Colorblind?” style links causes something very unpleasant to happen. Here’s a the default css style sheet.

I know I’m doing something obviously dumb, but it’s just not obvious to me. That’s the thing about what’s obviously dumb – the dumbness consists of the fact that the obvious isn’t.

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I may be on NPR’s Talk of the Nation call-in show tomorrow at 3pm EDT. The topic has to do with who you are online. (We don’t get the 3pm portion here in Boston. But it’s Webcast.) [Wednesday morning: Apparently, I’ll be on starting at about 3:40pm.] [Tags: full_of_myself tireless_self_promotion]

On the way to voting in town elections tonight – my vote didn’t register in the optical scanner so I might as well have not gone – I turned on On Point and there was danah boyd talking about who we are at MySpace. Brilliant as always. (You can listen here.)

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