Coming up in a couple of weeks I will be speaking as a special guest at Alternative Party, a digital culture conference in Helsinki, Finland. I'll be doing my main talk on October 25th plus an extra session on either the 24th or 26th depending on schedules.

After that I will head to do some touristing in Stockholm for a few days, then for my first trip to Russia to visit St. Petersburg on the 31st.

Have some recommendations in Stockholm or St. Petersburg area? Let me know. My hosts will take care of me in Finland.

I learned today that there is an exhibit about my father in the famous creation museum near Cincinnati. This museum is a multi-million dollar project set up by creationists as a pro-bible "natural history" museum that shows dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and how the flood carved the Grand Canyon and much more. It's all completely bullocks and a number of satirical articles about it have been written, including the account by SF writer John Scalzi.

With sadness I must report the passing of William C. Tate, my stepfather, on Thursday. Bill and my mother met and fell in love when I was a young teenager. He was a neighbour, and I had met him, and even stayed over at his house with his son before they would meet, which is a bit unusual. He was kind and generous and supported her and our family for many decades. While he died from cancer, it came upon him quite suddenly and he was fortunately strong until near the end.

Ok, admit it, who likes blogging in to a vacuum. You want to know how many people are actually reading your blog.

I have created a simple Perl script that scans your blog's log file and attempts to calculate how many people read the blog and the RSS feeds.

You can download the feed reader script. I release it under GPL2.

End of next week I'll be going to Munich/München for an interesting conference called DLD. Since the flight is so long and I haven't been to Bavaria since I was a kid, I booked a few extra days around the conference, even though it's not exactly the high season. I welcome comments from blog readers on stuff to do there, and in surrounding Bavaria -- we'll take some day trips to the Alps and maybe to Salzberg. I know there's a great science and tech museum we'll go to.

Computerworld has been nice enough to include me in their series on unsung innovators of the net. I should point out that I try to downplay the dot thing -- to me it's an amusing anecdote of having participated in the right mailing lists at the right time. I remain much more interested in whatever I will do next!

I've been informed that the ENIAC programmer talk featuring Jean Bartik, a member of the world's first software team, has been postponed until sometime in January. I'll update with more information when it is worked out. Donors can transfer their seat to the later event, get a refund, or give it as a donation as they wish.

Update: Sorry to say, this event has been postponed to January

Here are three events coming up that I will be involved with.

Burning Man of course starts next weekend and consumes much of my time. While I'm not doing any bold new art project this year, maintaining my 3 main ones is plenty of work, as is the foolishly taken on job of village organizer and power grid coordinator. I must admit I often look back fondly on my first Burning Man, where we just arrived and were effectively spectators. But you only get to do that once.

As I noted earlier, my web site got hacked. As a result, I decided to leave my old hosting company, PowerVPS.com, and find a new host. While another VPS would probably have managed, I know a woman in San Jose who runs a hosting company, simpli.biz, who offered me a good deal on a fast dedicated server. I'll grow into it, and in the meantime you should see much greater performance from my site.

I will make some final commentary on PowerVPS. I left for a variety of reasons, and they were certainly not 100% bad.

A few weeks ago, my site got hacked. The attacker inserted an iframe pointing to a malware site into most of my html pages. That of course is bad, but the story doesn't end there. (I should of course have upgraded my OS from the ancient one my hosting company gave years ago, but they don't really support that, and feel an upgrade consists of rebuilding from scratch.)

Well, this site is at a crawl now because the panorama I assembled of San Francisco in 1971 is on the digg.com front page. If you haven't seen it before it's on the San Francisco page, the panorama of SF from the top of the Bay Bridge in 1971.

I've been participating in online discussions about my favourite TV show, Battlestar Galactica, so I have collected a number of my selected postings about the show, along with some new ones, into a sub-blog on this web site.

If you are a fan of the site I invite you to subscribe to my Battlestar Galactica Analysis Blog.

From the shameless narcissism department: I was surprised to see myself and the EFF picked by PC World today at #12 on their 50 most important people on the web list. I'm really there as a proxy for the EFF, I suspect, but it's great to see our work recognized. I'm pleased to say the EFF is going like gangbusters right now with so many cases under our wing, and many thousands of new members in the last year, thanks in part to the AT&T lawsuit and others.

Join me next Thursday (one-eleven) at the one-eleven Minna gallery in San Francisco to celebrate EFF's 16th year. From 7 to 10pm. Suggested donation $20. Stop by if you're at Macworld.

Details at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005055.php