The CottingBlog

An open letter to the Johnson County Library patrons who last borrowed the "Dead Like Me" season 1 DVDs

2010-01-03T23:42:00.000-06:00

Learn how to handle DVDs so they don't get so scratched up they're unwatchable. Nimrods.

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2009 Edition

2010-01-01T16:20:00.001-06:00

It’s time for another “52 Books in 52 Weeks” recap.

The grand total was 66 books this year, well above last year’s total. I posted back in October when I met my yearly goal, so the last ten weeks of the year were pretty much gravy.

This year’s histogram:

By comparison, the same chart for last year:

My reading rate was more consistent this year, with two outliers. September was a busy month at work, which I suppose could explain why it was light on reading. June surprises me; you’d think the summer months would be more conducive to reading, but maybe not.

I really focused on continuing series this year. In addition to continuing to work through series by Jim Butcher, Lee Child, and Michael Connelly, I started reading Jasper Fforde, Charlie Huston, and Arthur Phillips.

Yes, I read the Twilight series. No, I’m not ashamed of it; now I know what all the fuss is about. I won’t go on about what I think is wrong with them; others have covered those issues better than I can, though perhaps not quite as humorously as in this comic. I’ll limit myself to saying that anyone who thinks that the Harry Potter series is bad for kids but Twilight isn’t has a misguided set of priorities, in my opinion.

Other quantitative facts:

Books by authors whose blogs I read regularly: 4
Books I own, signed by the author: 2
Books made into movies: 4 (with at least 3 more likely to be in the future)
Books that now I can’t remember having read: 2

That last one is probably an indication that I’m reading a little too much, at a rate above my retention level. One of the things I’m planning to do this year is capsule reviews after reading, which should at least give me something to refer back to.

Here’s the entire list for 2009, in reverse chronological order:

Coupland, Douglas. Generation A.
Fforde, Jasper. Lost In a Good Book.
Butcher, Jim. Death Masks.
Meyer, Stephenie. Breaking Dawn.
Locke, Christopher. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices.
Philips, Arthur. The Egyptologist: A Novel.
Posnanski, Joe. The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-stopping World Series: The Story of the 1975 Cincinnati Reds.
Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun.
Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M. Destroyer of Worlds.
See, Lisa. Shanghai Girls.
Brown, Dan. The Lost Symbol.
Joss, Morag. Half Broken Things.
Milton, Giles. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History.
Almond, Steve. Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America.
Silbert, Leslie. The Intelligencer.
Stafford, Tom and Webb, Matt. Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools for Using Your Brain in the World.
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl Who Played With Fire.
Bernstein, Peter L. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.
Grossman, Austin. Soon I Will Become Invincible.
Parker, T. Jefferson. Cold Pursuit.
Child, Lee. Echo Burning.
Hornfischer, James D. The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.
Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair.
Grann, David. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.
Huston, Charlie. No Dominion.
Lewis, Michael. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.
Petroski, Henry. Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer.
Connelly, Michael. The Last Coyote.
Potter, Christopher. You Are Here: A Portable History of the Universe.
Meyer, Stephenie. Eclipse.
Bonner, Kevin Jan. Furniture Restoration and Repair for Beginners.
Butcher, Jim. Summer Knight.
Schramm, Ken. The Compleat Meadmaker.
Nissel, Angela. Mixed: My Life in Black and White.
Meyer, Stephenie. New Moon.
Joss, Morag. Fruitful Bodies.
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
Huston, Charlie. Already Dead.
Safina, Carl. Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth’s Last Dinosaur.
Connelly, Michael. The Concrete Blonde.
Schneier, Bruce. Beyond Fear.
Philips, Arthur. Prague: A Novel.
Fowler, Chrisopher. The Victoria Vanishes.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight.
Rowling, J.K. The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
Roach, Mary. Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.
Child, Lee. Running Blind.
Petroski, Henry. The Evolution of Useful Things.
Butcher, Jim. Grave Peril.
Hodgman, John. More Information Than You Require.
Sedaris, David. Holidays on Ice.
Carlsen, Spike. A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats.
Vanderbilt, Tom. Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us).
Baricco, Alessandro. Silk.
Berenson, Alex. The Faithful Spy.
Zoellner, Tom. The Heartless Stone: A Journey Through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire.
Larsson, Stieg. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Schwarz, Christopher. Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use.
Dublanica, Steve. Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter.
O’Connell, Carol. Dead Famous.
Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.
Sobel, Dava. Galileo’s Daughter.
Pelecanos, George. The Turnaround.
Hieronymus, Stan. Brew Like a Monk.
Wright, Evan. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War.
Rucka, Greg. A Gentleman’s Game.

Variations on a Theme by an Insomniac

2009-12-30T00:41:00.000-06:00

I spent a little time playing with styling this blog by hand, then decided to fall back to one of Blogger's built-in themes. I'm still not 100% happy, but it will do for now.
This has been a good 52 Books/52 Weeks year. I finished #66 yesterday; I may get #67 before the year is out.
It's midnight, and I'm browsing through blog posts from six years ago instead of sleeping.

#52 is in the house.

2009-10-16T00:14:00.000-05:00

So is #53. I don't know which of the two I'll finish first. And it's only the middle of October.

More blog plumbing

2009-10-13T12:03:00.001-05:00

I have connected this blog to my Twitter account through twitterfeed. Let's see if this works.

Pardon the dust.

2009-09-23T18:11:00.000-05:00

I'm fiddling with the theme and other mechanical whatnots, so things may be a bit on the garish side for a little while. I apologize in advance to anyone who still reads this rag besides me for any offenses to your visual acuity or good taste.

Today, we were supposed to go camping.

2009-09-23T14:20:00.004-05:00

Four years ago today, we were supposed to go on a family camping trip. Instead, we went to the hospital, and our lives were never the same again.

September 22, 2005. Abbey started exhibiting the symptoms of a stomach bug: vomiting, lethargy. We were heading down to southern Missouri for a campout the next day, and figured this was a case of bad timing at the worst.

Throughout the night, she was up every half hour to throw up. Then we noticed the panting, the shortness of breath, and started to suspect that there was something more going on. We called the 24-hour nurse line: "Sounds like an asthma attack. Go ahead and take her to the emergency room."

The ER doctor took one whiff of her breath: "She's in DKA—she needs to be admitted immediately." An hour later, we were in the pediatric ICU at Children's Mercy Hospital, feeling shell-shocked and wondering about the future.

* * *

Abbey has been living with type 1 diabetes for four years now. Publicly, she leads the life of a normal ten-year-old, but privately it's anything but. She wears an insulin infusion pump, to ensure that her blood doesn't turn toxic. She sticks her fingers eight times a day to check her blood sugar level, to ensure that it's under control. She monitors what she eats, to ensure that the carbohydrates in her food are matched with enough insulin to metabolize them.

On October 10, 2009, we'll be participating in the JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund is committed to finding a cure for type 1 diabetes—not just treatment, but eradication of the disease in those who currently have it as well as its prevention in those who don't.

Please consider donating to our team.

Ten Years Ago: "Cottingham TNG" Ships

2009-04-01T05:45:00.001-05:00

This was originally posted to the InfoWorld Electric forums on 01 April 1999.

PR: "Cottingham TNG" Ships

April 1, 1999
For Immediate Release

Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C) of Olathe, KS, USA today announced their first product, Abigail Rose. "This product represents a major milestone for C&C," said marketing director Craig S. Cottingham. "Abigail Rose is was designed and produced entirely by C&C, from the ground up."

C&C describes Abigail Rose as "a cooperative set of non-linear servoactuators controlled by a non-deterministic processor, in a package only 20" long and weighing only 8 lb, 6 oz." What sets Abigail Rose apart is that the processor ships with only basic functionality enabled. More advanced tasks become possible as Abigail Rose adapts to its environment, effectively "learning" new behaviors. "It's amazing to watch," noted Cottingham. "In the few short hours since the release party, we've seen an increase in input/output processing and fewer audible error conditions." Abigail Rose also includes an adaptive code generator featuring C&C's Dynamic Realtime Object Oriented Language (DROOL), and can produce large quantities of DROOL in a short time period.

The product was announced at a developer's conference held on an unlikely date (April 1st, commonly known as "April Fool's Day" in the US) at an unlikely time (5:45 AM CST) in an unlikely location (St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, MO, USA). "At first we were worried that people might think that the announcement was some kind of April Fool's Day prank," Cottingham said. "At C&C, however, we believe that once the product is ready, it ships." As evidence, he pointed to the fact that the development team, led by Angela Cottingham, was working hard right up to the literal moment the product was released. "We're very proud of the quality of work they did. We in the marketing department basically provided them with an incomplete design specification, and they came up with this gem."

Additional details on Abigail Rose, including product illustrations, can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/craig.cottingham/AbigailRose19990401

About Cottingham & Cottingham (C&C)

C&C was formed in 1995 from the merger of two unrelated corporate entities, with the goal of maximizing long-term gains while providing an enjoyable end-user experience. They can be reached at craig.cottingham@gmail.com.

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2008 Edition

2009-01-03T21:17:00.004-06:00

It’s time for another “52 Books in 52 Weeks” recap.

The grand total was 49 books this year, three short of my goal. I recall around the beginning of December that I was running about 5 or 6 books off my pace, so apparently I made up a little ground at the end. Not enough, as it turns out.

I keep track of both the books I’ve read and my todo list on Backpack, as a checklist. Recently, they added the date an item was checked off to the list display, but it looks like they’ve been collecting it all along. As a result, I now have a record of when I finished each book, to within a day or two.

This lends itself to some more sophisticated statistics.

For instance, here’s a histogram of how many books I read in each month of 2008:

July was my best month, April my worst. April was when I fell behind, and I never recovered the pace, though I came close in July.

Other quantitative facts:

Books by sportswriters: 3
Books by children of former US Vice Presidents: 1
Books made into movies: 3

The biggest disappointment of the year was, I think, The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold. Her first book, The Lovely Bones, remains one of my all-time favorite books, and I was excited to learn earlier today that it’s been made into a movie, by Peter Jackson no less. Compared to it, The Almost Moon was a letdown. No, that’s not entirely fair; it was a letdown even when not compared to The Lovely Bones.

Picking my favorite from this list is a lot harder. In fact, I’m not going to. Maybe I could come up with a top 10, but since that’s almost 20% of the total list, that doesn’t seem terribly useful.

Here’s the entire list for 2008, in reverse chronological order:

Fatsis, Stefan. A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL.
Sheehan, Michael A. Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves.
Phillips, Marie. Gods Behaving Badly.
de Santis, Pablo. The Paris Enigma.
Butcher, Jim. Fool Moon.
Quinion, Michael. Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds: ingenious tales of words and their origins.
Shepard, Jim. Project X.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t.
Pelecanos, George P. Hell to Pay.
Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M. Juggler of Worlds.
Posnanski, Joe. The Good Stuff.
Petroski, Henry. Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering.
Connelly, Michael. The Black Ice.
Deford, Frank. I’m Just Getting Started.
Huff, Tanya. Smoke and Shadows.
Walsh, Peter. It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff.
Gill, Michael Gates. How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.
Sedaris, David. When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.
Miller, John Ramsey. Upside Down.
Coupland, Douglas. Girlfriend in a Coma.
Spencer-Fleming, Julia. I Shall Not Want.
Wells, Ken. Travels with Barley: A Journey Through Beer Culture in America.
Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
Butcher, Jim. Storm Front.
Couch, Dick. The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228.
Johnson, Adam. Parasites Like Us.
Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Child, Lee. Nothing to Lose.
Helprin, Mark. The Pacific and Other Stories.
Fuller, Alexandra. Scribbling the Cat.
Joss, Morag. Fearful Symmetry.
Mezrich, Ben. Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.
Prachett, Terry. Carpe Jugulum.
Metzger, Robert A. Cusp.
Connelly, Michael. The Overlook.
Coupland, Douglas. The Gum Thief.
Logan, Chuck. After the Rain.
Mayle, Peter. A Good Year.
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us.
Crile, George. Charlie Wilson’s War.
Gore, Kristin. Sammy’s House.
Clarke, Thurston. Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands.
Frey, Stephen. The Chairman.
Niven, Larry and Lerner, Edward M. Fleet of Worlds.
Curtis, Bryan. The Explainer.
Sebold, Alice. The Almost Moon.
Buford, Bill. Heat : an amateur’s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany.
Grafton, Sue. T is for Trespass.

There's another one in the family, now.

2008-03-20T01:10:00.003-05:00

Angela just got back from the hospital, where her niece was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The good news is, since we went through the same thing two and a half years ago, Angela's brother and his wife had a better idea of what they were dealing with than we did at the time. As a result, their daughter wasn't as far into DKA as our daughter was. The bad news is, there's now one more child in the world with diabetes.

Finally, graft and corruption.

2008-03-02T20:56:00.002-06:00

We went to Wichita yesterday for Equifest of Kansas, a horse-related expo. It was nice to get out of the house and go somewhere that we hadn't been before. On the plus side, to get there from here you go through the Flint Hills, which is the closest thing we have in Kansas to, well, hills. On the minus side, apparently I snore when I sleep, and I snore louder (or perhaps more) in hotel beds than the one at home, so neither my wife nor my daughter got as much sleep as they'd have liked.

For lunch on Saturday we went to River City Brewing Company in Old Town Wichita. They're in the middle of their 15th anniversary celebration, and the place was packed even at about 2 in the afternoon. For the occasion, they had on tap a porter aged in Bulleit bourbon whiskey barrels; it had a slight oaky, smoky flavor, as well as a touch of bourbon—which is not necessarily a bad thing. I also sampled an oak-aged old ale, which was tasty but had little to none of the oxidized character you usually find in an old ale. The chocolate bock was lighter in body than a traditional bock (note that I'm not talking about Shiner Bock here), but with some roasty, chocolately notes that you don't find in a maibock. The Rock Island Red was a good American pale ale, but not red enough for an American amber (which a red ale should qualify as).

Yes, I judge beer even when I'm out for food or fun. This time, I was aided and abetted by our friend Stephen, who not only is a horse person (we met up with him at Equifest) but also a fellow homebrewer from the NE Kansas area. He noticed that several customers were carrying T-shirts the same burnt-orange color as those the waitstaff were wearing, and asked our server about them. She said they weren't for sale, but the manager was giving them away to selected individuals at his discretion. Upon hearing this, Stephen and I pulled out our BJCP membership cards and explained that we are registered beer judges, and did that count for anything? Sure enough, she came back a few minutes later with T-shirts for us.

See? Being a beer judge is cool. :-)

There is no dark side of the moon...

2008-02-20T21:55:00.002-06:00

...fact is, it's all dark.

Taken with a Canon PowerShot A530 jammed up against a 25mm eyepiece in a 4.5" Newtonian telescope. I was hoping to get a picture at the moment of totality, but the mother of all cloudbanks moved in from the southwest.

Amazon is not killing the iTunes Store any time soon.

2008-02-16T11:56:00.002-06:00

I have finally started clearing out our CD collection. There are a lot of discs in here that we never listen to, and others that we bought just for one song. (Remember when that was your only option?) Half Price Books offers a decent price for used CDs with little hassle, so that has been my outlet of choice so far. The proceeds from selling discs will go to buying individual tracks to replace more CDs, though I’ve found fewer than ten songs so far that I feel need to be replaced.

Not every song on CD is available at the iTunes Store, and getting rid of plastic mass outweighs brand loyalty in this case. Amazon’s MP3 store got a lot of press a few months back for offering DRM-free music at a price matching or beating Apple’s FairPlay-protected files. I figure that’s a good alternative, right?

One of the discs I’m looking to replace is a compilation of songs from movie soundtracks, produced by Blockbuster. The only track worth keeping is Vince Gill’s “Ophelia” from the Mel Gibson-Jodie Foster flick Maverick. The iTunes Store doesn’t have it, so let’s check the Amazon MP3 store.

Searching on “vince gill” is easy enough, but returns 285 results, more than I’m willing to sift through. Any way to refine the search? Not that I can see. Okay, I’ll sort by song title and just page down to the “O”s. Clicking on the “Song Title” column header doesn’t work. Off to the right, I notice a dropdown that says “Sort by”. That looks promising. My options are “Relevance”, “Bestselling”, “Price: Low to High”, “Price: High to Low”, “Avg. Customer Review”, and “Release Date”. No “Song Title”, no “Album”, apparently no “Artist” (assuming I searched on just a last name or the name of a song or album).

And like that, I suspect that I won’t be shopping the Amazon MP3 store again any time soon.

What's next, a Gopher client?

2008-01-18T19:07:00.001-06:00

Lotus Notes on the iPhone

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2006 Edition

2008-01-02T23:32:00.001-06:00

For the sake of completeness, here is the list of books I read in 2006. I didn’t realize until now that I only managed 48 books that year, which I think says a lot about rules and how they can do more harm than good.

Colicchio, Tom. Think Like a Chef.
Bear, Greg. Dead Lines.
Alder, Ken. The Measure of All Things.
Wozniak, Steve. iWoz: How I invented the personal computer, co-founded Apple, and had fun doing it.
Spencer-Fleming, Julia. All Mortal Flesh.
Coupland, Douglas. JPod.
O’Brien, Cormac. Secret Lives of the First Ladies: What Your Teachers Never Told You About the Women of the White House.
Haddon, Mark. A Spot of Bother.
DeMille, Nelson. The Charm School.
Connelly, Michael. Void Moon.
MacDonald, Laura. Curse of the Narrows.
Barry, Dave. Tricky Business.
Pelecanos, George P. Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go.
Pelecanos, George P. Nick’s Trip.
Pelecanos, George P. A Firing Offense.
Vowell, Sarah. Assassination Vacation.
Taber, George M. Judgment of Paris: California vs. France and the Historic 1976 Paris Tasting that Revolutionized Wine.
Oliver, Garrett. The Brewmaster’s Table.
Noonen, Greg. New Brewing Lager Beer.
MacFarlane, Alan. The Empire of Tea: The Remarkable History of the Plant that Took Over the World.
Meloy, Maile. Liars and Saints.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Child, Lee. The Hard Way.
Marson, Bonnie. Sleeping with Schubert.
Pratchett, Terry. Thud!
Ackerman, Kenneth D. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield.
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses.
Cody, Diablo. Candy Girl.
Rucka, Greg. Private Wars.
Smith, Kyle. Love Monkey.
Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter.
Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.
Defrain, Darren. The Salt Palace.
Tayman, John. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.
King, Stephen. Cell.
Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.
Robbins, Tom. Wild Ducks Flying Backward.
Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal.
Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys.
Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink.
Berendt, John. The City of Falling Angels.
Pelecanos, George. Hard Revolution.
Story, Rosalyn. More than You Know.
Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild.
Grafton, Sue. S is for Silence.

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2007 Edition

2008-01-02T23:24:00.001-06:00

In past years, I’ve tried a number of rules to adhere to the letter of the “52 books in 52 weeks” law. In general, I’ve found they get in the way of just reading. So, this year I lifted most of the restrictions, and decided to start on 1 January, stop on 31 December, and come what may in the middle.

The results were a little surprising.

I passed 52 books somewhere in October or November, I forget which. Even with something of a dry spell towards the end of the year, I still managed to finish my 65th book on 30 December.

Highlights from the year in reading:

No more Harry Potter books. This is a mixed blessing, as they got so big there at the end that they took a fair chunk of time to read.
Three more novels by Lee Child from the Jack Reacher series. I feel a little guilty about devoting so much of the year (almost 5%) to a single author, but they’re ripping yarns, and I just can’t help myself.
Three books with “CIA” in the title. I didn’t notice that until reviewing this list.
I’m glad I have discovered Angela Nissel. (Come to think of it, her book makes two by panelists from NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me.)
Ken Jennings’ Braniac led me to http://www.ken-jennings.com, which was worth reading the book by itself. (Not that the book wasn’t worth it, too. Highly recommended.) I’ve been subscribed to his Tuesday Trivia email for several months now, and while I don’t compete for the big prizes, I enjoy playing along at home.

Forward-selling for 2008:

After two years, Sue Grafton finally delivered T is for Trespass. Santa delivered it below the tree. It will be my first read for the year. (By this weekend. I promise.)
Also on deck currently are The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones, which remains one of my favorite books evar) and Heat by Bill Buford (a spontaneous pickup at the library).
And of course, some fraction of the hundreds of books on my todo list.

The list for 2007, in reverse chronological order:

Child, Lee. Die Trying.
Gischler, Victor. Suicide Squeeze.
Bodanis, David. Electric Universe: The Shocking True Story of Electricity.
Rankin, Ian. Watchman.
Couch, Dick. The Finishing School: Earning the Navy SEAL Trident.
Pratchett, Terry. Making Money.
Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire.
Miller, John Ramsey. Inside Out.
Finder, Joseph. Paranoia.
Abbott, Karen. Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul.
Gibson, William. Spook Country.
Black, Baxter. Hey, Cowboy, Wanna Get Lucky?
Brooks, Max. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Connolly, John. Bad Men.
Connelly, Michael. The Black Echo.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Plotz, Dave. The Genius Factory.
Moran, Lindsay. Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy.
Pelecanos, George. Drama City.
Reilly, Rick. Hate Mail from Cheerleaders.
Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods.
Child, Lee. Killing Floor.
Picoult, Jody. Nineteen Minutes.
Butcher, Jim. White Night.
Joss, Morag. Funeral Music.
Budiansky, Stephen. Battle of Wits.
Diamond, Jared. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
Dunning, John. The Bookman’s Promise.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Yuan, Michael Juntao and Heute, Thomas. JBoss Seam: Simplicity and Power Beyond Java EE.
Meltzer, Brad. The Zero Game.
Pelecanos, George. The Night Gardener.
Gehtland, Justin; Galbraith, Ben; Almaer, Dion. Pragmatic Ajax.
Nissel, Angela. The Broke Diaries: The Completely True and Hilarious Misadventures of a Good Girl Gone Broke.
Brogan, Jan. A Confidential Source.
Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation.
Preston, Douglas and Child, Lincoln. Still Life with Crows.
Smiley, Jane. A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money and Luck.
Phillips, Scott. Cottonwood.
Sterling, Bruce. The Zenith Angle.
Child, Lee. Bad Luck and Trouble.
Godin, Seth. Small is the New Big, and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas.
Hiaasen, Carl. Nature Girl.
Tennant, Alan. On the Wing: To the Edge of the Earth With the Peregrine Falcon.
Lehrer, Kate. Confessions of a Bigamist.
Viesturs, Ed with Roberts, David. No Shortcuts to the Top: Climbing the World’s Highest Peaks.
Schwarcz, Joe. The Fly in the Ointment: 70 Fascinating Commentaries on the Science of Everyday Life.
Krueger, William Kent. Blood Hollow.
Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail.
Andrews, Russell. Aphrodite.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America.
Heffernan, Thomas Farel. Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock.
Johansen, Iris. Fatal Tide.
Katzenbach, John. The Analyst.
Gaiman, Neil. Fragile Things.
Halpern, Jake. Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and other extreme locales.
Littell, Robert. The Company: A Novel of the CIA.
Duncan, Dayton. Horatio’s Drive: America’s First Road Trip.
Jensen, Jane. Dante’s Equation.
Richelson, Jeffrey. The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology.
Felber, Adam. Schrödinger’s Ball.
Groneberg, Tom. One Good Horse.
Jennings, Ken. Braniac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs.

Week 20, Book 19: Private Wars

2006-05-20T11:08:00.000-05:00

Rucka, Greg. Private Wars. This was an impulse pickup, as I was scanning the limited checkout shelf at the library. I read Rucka's A Fistful of Rain last year, and I'm a sucker for spy novels. The main character, Tara Chace, is an intelligence operative in the same mold as Tom Clancy's Clark, but more believable. She's also a new mother, and the conflict between the things she loves (her job and her daughter) constantly tears at her. But make no mistake, this is not a touchy-feely book; it's hardcore spy thriller. Private Wars is a sequel to A Gentleman's Game, which I must now add to my todo list. :-)

Week 20, Book 18: Love Monkey

2006-05-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

Smith, Kyle. Love Monkey. I was surprised to learn that the television series was based on a book. I was even more surprised to learn that I already had the book on my todo list. I enjoyed this a lot—Kyle Smith's writing reminds me a lot of Nick Hornby's (to whom Smith pays homage by having his protagonist mention a book in which the main character keeps making top 5 lists). I can see why this ended up on TV instead of as a movie; it's similar to About a Boy, and the events of September 11, 2001 work into the background. The ending left me feeling a lot more satisfied than, say, The Salt Palace did.

Week 19, Book 17: Everything Bad is Good For You.

2006-05-11T10:58:00.000-05:00

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. The basic premise is, popular mass media is not dumbing us down, turning us all into the lowest common denominator, but is actually increasing in complexity, forcing us to think harder and better. An interesting read on the heels of Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's books.

Week 18, Book 16: A Confederacy of Dunces

2006-05-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces. It took me a while to get into this one—for the first few days, I felt like I was reading it because I was supposed to, not because I wanted to. The characters were largely unlikeable, and the whole thing read like a farce. Then, I realized that that was the point.

Catching up.

2006-04-30T17:51:00.000-05:00

The 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge has not shaped up like I expected. As you may have noticed from the recent posts (or lack thereof), I had a five week dry spell at the end of March and most of April. Things have been busy at work and I just haven't been taking the time to read in the evenings like I used to.

I may need to alter the rules just a bit more. Right now, there's actually a disincentive to start a book toward the end of the week—I have to start and finish the book in the same week for it to be the "official" read for that week. In retrospect, I think that was appropriate for the first week of the year, but now I should count a book in the week it was finished, with the ultimate goal of finishing 52 books in 52 weeks.

I just put a bunch more books on hold at the library, so the count should pick up again for the next few weeks.

Week 16, Book 15: The Salt Palace

2006-04-23T17:38:00.000-05:00

Defrain, Darren. The Salt Palace.. It would be easy to characterize this book as one of the dust jacket blurbs does: as a small narrative positioned above footnotes about the Church of Latter Day Saints and the Utah Jazz. The footnotes aren't just marginalia, but a whole other narrative—or, rather, two—in their own right. In fact, in one instance, when the narrator is unable to continue his story temporarily, there's a whole chapter that's nothing but a footnote, that itself has two footnotes.

However, that would be selling the main narrative short. It's the story of a young man born and raised in the Mormon church, now... not necessarily lapsed, but certainly off the spiritual path his family and faith would have chosen for him. He sets off on a road trip back home to Utah, which not coincidentally mirrors the exodus of early Mormons from the Midwest to the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Along the way is adventure, misadventure, and self-discovery.

Unfortunately, the ending is somewhat abrupt, after veering in a direction that left me wondering if it was supposed to be real or imagined. I could have done with more closure, but then again maybe that's the point of modern literature.

Week 16, Book 14: The Colony

2006-04-21T14:16:00.000-05:00

Tayman, John. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai.. We honeymooned on Molokai, and our flight from Honolulu landed briefly at Kalaupapa, but we weren't allowed to deplane. A few days later, we gazed down on the peninsula from the top of the cliff, but the National Park Service was not running tours (led down the cliff path on muleback) at the time, so that was the closest we got.

The Colony tells the tale of the residents of Kalaupapa, exiled from the rest of Hawaiian society for having contracted leprosy. I knew a little of the history, from our time on Molokai and shortly after, but Tayman's research and interviews with some of the remaining residents shows that most of the information out there is little better than urban legend. This is important American history—the laws banishing patients to Kalaupapa were on the books until 1969—and I recommend it highly.

Week 11, Book 13: Cell

2006-03-19T14:07:00.000-06:00

King, Stephen. Cell.. I was really hoping that now that Stephen King has finished the Dark Tower cycle, he'd go back to the basic, visceral horror on which he built his reputation. No such luck, unfortunately. Cell is cut from the same cloth as just about every other book he's written in I-don't-know-how-long: trouble is a'brewin', unlikely compatriots find each other in their time of need, prophetic visions are... viewed I guess, help in the form of a magic bullet arrives from an unexpected source, there's a big showdown between good and evil (or normal and abnormal), and we're done. I enjoyed this more than I thought I would once I figured out where it was going, but if you're familiar with King's work, mash up The Stand with Trucks and save yourself some time.

Week 9, Book 12: A Crack in the Edge of the World

2006-03-05T11:42:00.000-06:00

Winchester, Simon. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.. I've been reading a lot of my favorite authors lately—must be a "comfort food for the reading mind" kind of thing. In my opinion, no one does popularized history like Simon Winchester. This time, the topic is the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Thanks to the California Gold Rush of 1849, San Francisco was one of the premiere American cities at the time, a shining jewel and a den of iniquity at the same time. Thanks to the earthquake and subsequent fire (which was the more damaging of the two), the city lost its priority over Los Angeles and never recovered it. Thrown in for good measure is a layman's introduction to geology, plate tectonics, and seismology.

Week 8, Book 11: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

2006-02-24T11:21:00.000-06:00

Robbins, Tom. Wild Ducks Flying Backward.. This is a collection of shorter works—reprints from magazines, for instance, and a screenplay treatment that apparently went nowhere. I'm normally a big fan of Robbins' work, especially the florid and parenthetical way he turns a phrase, but repeated short bursts like this left me feeling pummelled.

Week 7, Book 10: Going Postal

2006-02-17T11:32:00.000-06:00

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal.. The (next-to-) latest in the ongoing Discworld saga. This one deals with the rebirth of the Ankh-Morpork post office. As usual, Pratchett's satire is spot-on. The more I read, the more I want to read. Here's hoping that he keeps writing for a long time to come.

Week 7, Book 9: Freakonomics

2006-02-15T11:36:00.000-06:00

Levitt, Steven D. and Dubner, Stephen J. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.. The book has been out for a while, and it's experiencing a rebirth of sorts (#5 on The New York Times bestselling nonfiction list this week), so there's not much I can add to the hoopla. Suffice it to say that it's not a dry read, and while it does come to its own conclusions about some things, its primary aim is to make you question your assumptions about the world—in other words, don't just accept the obvious answer because it's obvious. This book makes a good companion to the works of Malcolm Gladwell.

Week 6, Book 8: Anansi Boys

2006-02-13T23:07:00.000-06:00

Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. I'm trying to think how to describe this book without mucking it up, but it's late and I could use sleep. Neil Gaiman spins a good tale.

Every little bit helps.

2006-02-10T23:25:00.000-06:00

Please consider registering as a bone marrow donor.

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, more so lately. I used to donate blood regularly—every eight weeks, like clockwork. My blood is type O negative, which means that it can be given to anyone regardless of their blood type with minimal chance of complications (which is why in shows like ER you hear phrases like "push 2 units of O neg") and CMV negative, which means that it can be given to infants and pregnant women without concerns about them contracting, well, a cytomegalovirus infection. Check the link above for more information; all I know for sure is that it means I get called by the community blood center a lot.

Unfortunately, the last few years I've been busy with work, and usually feeling less healthy than I should (largely, I suppose, because I sit at my desk all day instead of exercising), the upshot being that I donate very, very rarely anymore. I reached my first gallon before I started college, my second some years ago, and am probably nowhere near a third.

That will change.

Week 6, Book 7: A Long Way Down

2006-02-10T12:17:00.000-06:00

Hornby, Nick. A Long Way Down. Four people meet on New Year's Eve, on the roof of a building in London, because they've each independently decided to end their lives by jumping. What happens next is, well, the story. It reminded me a lot of About a Boy (the movie, not the book, I'm afraid to admit).

Some fives

2006-02-07T22:55:00.000-06:00

Five software packages (not from Apple) that I use every day

Five RSS feeds I look forward to reading every day

Five websites that could be my only bookmarks

I won't even try to pass this off as yesterday's.

2006-02-07T19:36:00.000-06:00

Right after I went to bed last night, I realized I hadn't posted for the 6th. I thought about getting up and either pre-dating a post, or claiming that I was still golden as long as it wasn't midnight on the International Date Line, but then I just went to sleep instead. It's not like I'm going to fire myself for not meeting an arbitrary deadline.

Somehow, we have become the TiVo Rescue Mission. Yesterday, someone posted on Freecycle a Series 1 with a blown modem. Since we already have one of those, I figured, why not make a matched set? This brings our total to four, only one of which is in fully working order. A second one, our original Series 1, we use as a glorified VCR. The other two are in various states of disrepair. One of these days, I need to break out the tools again.

Quick Impressions from the First Half of Super Bowl XL, Minus the First Hour, As Filtered Through TiVo

2006-02-05T20:57:00.000-06:00

The Michelob Ultra commercial was good. Not great, but good.
Seattle was robbed. I thought it was obvious that the ball did not break the plane of the goal line. However, the replay judge has to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt, which is why I suspect the ruling on the field was allowed to stand.
How does GoDaddy.com figure that a lame-ass ad like that is going to generate enough US$1.99 domain registrations to pay for itself?
The Sprint ad ("crime deterrent"), on the other hand, made me laugh out loud. I'm still giggling about it. I have four old cell phones sitting on my desk at the moment—now I know what to do with them.
How does a placekick that appears to leave the ground straight, end up curving wide to the right? You're in a dome, so there's no wind. A kick that long is not easy, I'm sure, but damned if it didn't look good until, well, it didn't.
Whoever thought of combining the words "The Rolling Stones" and "live" either should be shot, or commended for his/her sense of humor.
The best ad was easily the promo for Lost. Somebody had a hell of a lot of fun editing that. The Sprint ad comes in second. The various ads for Desperate Housewives get honorable mention. Speaking of which, was someone being intentionally ironic in identifying Edie—who Angela describes as "the trampy one"—with Hef and his girlfriends?

It's the fiscal day that counts

2006-02-04T23:11:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine in high school came up with the term fiscal day. Just as some organizations (companies, governments) have fiscal years that don't correspond to calendar years, the fiscal day doesn't necessarily correspond to the clock day. If it's 4 AM, and you're still up, and you haven't gone to bed since yesterday, it's not today but still fiscal yesterday.

This is all an attempt to distract you from two tiny details:

I backed up the timestamp on this post twelve hours.
I missed posting yesterday.

Week 5, Book 6: Blink

2006-02-03T22:47:00.000-06:00

Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Malcolm Gladwell may just about be my favorite non-fiction author—though he's neck-and-neck with Simon Winchester.

Our daughter's insulin pump arrived today. I've been looking at pictures on their website and in their marketing materials, and got to see one in person a couple of weeks ago, and somehow I'm still amazed at how small this thing it. It's just about the same size as my new cell phone (a Samsung x495).
Speaking of Abbey, we had a date night tonight. My wife had dinner with a friend of hers, so Abbey and I went out to Macaroni Grill. We spent the better part of dinner doing math problems on the paper tablecloth.
I am finally starting to grok Eclipse. Having a laptop that is capable of running it helps. :-)
I bought an ounce of Rishi jasmine white tea the last time I went to Whole Foods, and I have to say that I'm somewhat disappointed by white tea. I guess I'm used to the tannic kick of black tea—even green tea seems a little weak to me. Antioxidants, however, are a good thing, so I think I'm going to try blending in some oolong.

Squeaking in under the wire

2006-02-02T23:26:00.000-06:00

It's still Thursday. This still counts.

I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. I popped into the library on Wednesday to find something, anything to read this week, and was happy to see a book that I've actually been wanting to read on the limited loan shelf.
We upgraded our cell phones last week or so to Samsung x495s. They come with a 168-page user's manual. One hundred and sixty-eight pages. Reading this should count toward my 52 books in 52 weeks.

Nose to the grindstone, etc.

2006-02-01T16:19:00.000-06:00

It's too late for resolutions for the whole year, so I'll have to think a little smaller. This month (February 2006) I will try to post every day, at least once a day, to this blog—even if I think I have nothing in particular to say. I suspect I will surprise myself.

Week 4, Book 5: The City of Falling Angels

2006-01-26T23:36:00.000-06:00

Berendt, John. The City of Falling Angels. I never read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but I did see the movie, and this book felt a lot like the movie of the first one. If that makes sense. John Berendt has a way of writing that says, "I'm just going to immerse myself in this environment and write down everything that happens, and we'll see what pops out the other side."

One side effect is that I so want to visit Venice now.

Week 3, Book 4: Hard Revolution

2006-01-20T23:33:00.000-06:00

Pelecanos, George. Hard Revolution. One of my favorite authors lately.

Slight rule change for 52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2006 Edition

2006-01-16T10:06:00.000-06:00

I decided to amend the third rule in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge, 2006 Edition. The original rule was:

A book counts towards the total when I finish it.

The new rule is:

A book counts towards the goal if I start it on or after Sunday of a given week and finish it on or before Saturday of the same week.

I think this tightens up the schedule a little, and forces me closer to the original goal: 52 books in 52 weeks.

One side effect is that now I need to strategize. I finished Rosalyn Story's More Than You Know late last Friday for the book for week 2. I'm going to be on the road at the end of this week, and busy most of the time, so I really need to finish this week's book by Wednesday night. I could have started my next book (Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos) on Saturday, but then it wouldn't have counted for this week. As a result, I had to (gasp!) not read until Sunday.

Fortunately, Google Earth is now available for Mac OS X, so I have something else to do with my time. (Rob, that's not a shout-out, but hello anyway. :-)

Week 2, Book 3: More Than You Know

2006-01-14T10:02:00.000-06:00

Story, Rosalyn. More Than You Know. I enjoyed this immensely. Any book in which Kansas City figures prominently earns points in my book. Mentions of lesser-known features (the Folger's plant downtown, the old Monarchs stadium) earn double points. Mentions of Arthur Bryant's earn triple points. :-)

Week 2, Book 2: Into the Wild

2006-01-08T23:18:00.000-06:00

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. I missed finishing this in week 1 by about 12 hours.

Week 1, Book 1: S is for Silence

2006-01-07T20:04:00.000-06:00

Grafton, Sue. S is for Silence. I actually finished this yesterday, and nearly forgot to blog about it until just now. I'm deep into Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, but I don't think I'll squeak it in this week.

52 Books in 52 Weeks, 2006 Edition

2005-12-19T20:56:00.000-06:00

I might as well go on the record now in accepting the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge again this year.

For those of you too apathetic or lazy to click on the link, I'll paste the rules to last year's challenge (because I'm too apathetic or lazy to type them from scratch):

Only books read entirely in 2006 count. If I start a book on New Year's Eve, too bad—it doesn't count.
Only books that I haven't read before will count. Sue Grafton's latest Kinsey Millhone novel (S is for Silence) is out, so I expect I'll be reading it some time in 2006. However, if I reread any of the previous 18 stories in the series, they won't count.
A book counts towards the total when I finish it.
The goal is not to finish 52 books in 2006, but to finish at least one each week, which ends on Saturday. If I complete more than one book in a single Sunday-to-Saturday period, I don't get to slack off the following week.

Now I just need to find that freakishly long list of book titles I left lying around the hard drive of my old laptop.

Back in the saddle again

2005-10-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally did it. I combined malt, water, and hops in a big pot and brought it to a boil.

Yes, for the first time in almost 6 months, there's beer in that thar fermenter. It's a Scottish ale, and while the target gravity didn't turn out where I thought it would (which is something of a surprise when you're brewing with malt extract instead of all-grain), it's still in the proper range for an export (80 shilling) ale.

That is, according to the BJCP. I should know, because as of this week I'm officially a Recognized BJCP beer judge. We took the test back in April, and have been waiting more-or-less patiently for the results. I'm happy to say that I scored high enough—but just barely—that with a little more judging experience under my belt I'll automatically qualify for a promotion in rank to Certified. To get any higher than that, though, I'll have to take the test again (and do better, of course). However, I'll also need more than ten times the amount of experience I already have, so I don't think this will be a concern any time soon.

Figures.

2005-10-19T15:26:00.000-05:00

I spend the better part of fifteen years tethered to a keyboard, and how do I finally end up with tendonitis in my right wrist? Applying stone veneer to the new columns on our front porch.

The worst part is that I'm not done, I want to be done in less than two weeks, and after four days my wrist still isn't back to normal. I'm not sure if I'm going to have to learn to apply mortar with my left hand, or just give up and find a stone-veneer-worthy epoxy to do the job.

Remotely Possible

2005-10-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

In all the hullabaloo about the new iMac, I'm surprised no one has mentioned that the remote looks remarkably like the iPod shuffle.

Lightning does strike twice

2005-09-19T17:20:00.000-05:00

I'm no longer talking like a pirate; instead, I'm now cursing like a sailor.

We took another lightning strike today. This time, the casualties are an Ethernet hub and possibly one port on an Ethernet switch.

Can anyone recommend a company to install a lightning rod on our house?

Garrr!

2005-09-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

Step lively, me hearties, or I'll keelhaul ya!

My iPod has a sense of irony

2005-09-16T16:43:00.000-05:00

The last song it played was by Barenaked Ladies. The song it's currently playing is by Debbie Gibson.

There's activity in the brewery again

2005-08-28T23:44:00.000-05:00

Unfortunately, it's not Saccharomyces cerevisiae; all fermentation is still on temporary hiatus. However, I started washing bottles today—or at least soaking off their labels in ammonia. After that, they'll get a run through the dishwasher, then a bath in diluted bleach to sanitize them. Now, I just need to get something in the works to fill them....

RIP TiVo 1?

2005-08-25T23:22:00.000-05:00

Tonight, we noticed that our TiVo hadn't been dialing in for programming updates in almost a week. At first I thought it might be the phone cord; we have two rabbits who occasionally get under the TV and chew through the phone cord (but only the phone cord; they've never gone for power cords or the cable TV cable or the audio cables). A quick check revealed no chew marks. I unplugged and replugged the cord at both ends, hoping it was a bad connection, but no dice. Finally, I dragged out The World's Longest Phone Cord and plugged the TiVo into a different outlet in another room. This confirmed our worst fear—the modem is futzed.

We had a bad lightning storm some time last week. One flash of lightning came with immediate thunder, and the smoke alarms in our house went off. (They're the kind that are wired together.) I suspected at the time that the house was hit, or at least suffered a near miss. Now, I'm more convinced, since we seem to have a casualty on our hands.

We've been TiVo users for nearly 6 years. The prospect of facing television without it is a little scary. The clock is ticking; we have less than a week of program information remaining. After that, the box reverts to a glorified VCR.

Three options have come to mind:

Someone we know has a Series 1 of vintage similar to ours. The hard drive in that one has failed, but as far as I know the modem still works. They can't use it because they no longer have a landline. We may try to beg, borrow, barter, or buy it and transplant the hard drive from ours into it.
Repair kits are available; Google for "tivo modem repair". I don't know how long it would take for one to arrive, and they seem to involve soldering surface mount components (in other words, really really small electronic parts). I can probably handle that (because Daddy can fix anything) but my eyesight isn't what it used to be. You can get a replacement modem that doesn't require cracking the box, but it costs almost as much as a new TiVo (see below).
We bite the bullet and buy a new Series 2. The good news is that they can be had for around $100, which is a lot less than I paid for the Series 1 six years ago.

In the meantime, please think happy thoughts for our TiVo.

On Piracy

2005-08-25T21:22:00.000-05:00

No, not the RIAA kind. In fact, Angela is buying songs from the iTunes Music Store while I type this.

I'm talking about the real thing. One of the books I'm currently reading is Pirates of Pensacola by Keith Thomson. It's not To Kill a Mockingbird by any stretch of the imagination, but if anything qualifies as "light-hearted romp", this is it—and it's a damn sight better than the last book set in the Caribbean that I read. There's just something about the premise—that pirates are alive and well and flourishing, sort of, in the Caribbean— that tickles my fancy.

Then, tonight we were at PetSmart buying rabbit litter when we stopped to look at the birds. I suddenly had this revelation that it would be cool to get a parrot and teach it to talk like a pirate.

That's all. Back to your regularly scheduled lives, already in progress.

Back in the RSS, or how to lose a customer

2005-08-24T20:52:00.000-05:00

I have fired up an RSS reader again, for the first time in months. I had to give it up last time because I was trying to read between 100 and 200 feeds every day (I don't remember how many, and I can't recreate the list if I wanted to—but more about that later), two of which were Boing Boing and Engadget. If you've ever read either, you know they're each good for twenty or so posts a day.

Well, there was a second reason. I probably could have mustered the self-control to prune my feed list. After all, I did pull the plug. More on that second reason later.

This time around, I'm keeping it small. I'm currently subscribed to 20 feeds, but three of them I own or contribute to (however poorly or infrequently), and a couple others came by default with the newsreader I'm using, looked interesting for the time being, but may be dropped later. My motivation this time was keeping up with my blog buddy. (Ooh. That reminds me of another friend's blog. Up my count to 21.)

It turns out that one's newsreader can have a profound impact on one's enthusiasm for news feeds. Come to think of it, that probably goes for just about every computing activity, at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm that sad, sad combination of code gnome and Macintosh user. I'm regularly awash in aesthetics, and I know from experience how hard it is to write a good, usable application—so I have zero tolerance for third-rate cack that looks like it was cobbled together by some bozo with Visual Basic and freshly-cracked copy of Visual Basic for Dummies. (Oh. Sweet. Buddha. I had to click on two different products at Amazon to find that link. It's going to affect my recommendations, I know it.) I'm spinning off on a tangent. Time to reel it back in.

The first two newsreaders I tried way back when were NetNewsWire and PulpFiction. NetNewsWire seems to be a favorite in the Macintosh community, but it never did it for me. It may have been the interface (I seem to remember it looked so 1999, and I freely admin that I'm an Aqua tramp); or it may have been because it came stocked with a zillion feeds, only three of which held any interest.

PulpFiction, on the other hand, was like that person you lusted after all through high school—pretty to look at, but when you got to know it better, the experience was so excruciating that you wondered what the hell you'd been thinking. In the case of PulpFiction, it was chock-full of Cocoa eye candy, but it was slow. I'd say it was as slow as molasses, but that would be unfair to the sorghum industry. It made me regret every second I spent trying to do anything with it. Come to think of it, there were a few people in high school who probably said the same thing about me.

NewsFire—now that was like... no, I'm not naming names. Let's just say I'm too young for Christie Brinkley and too old for Christy Carlson Romano. Now imagine she lives next door. And she thinks you're cool. NewsFire was like that. I'd call it love at first sight, but I'm pretty sure that's illegal in Kansas.

NewsFire is almost everything a Mac OS X application should be. It's slick, but not gaudy. The interface is simple, but highly functional: a column of feed names, with the count of how many posts you haven't read, on the left, and a pane on the right. Click on a feed name, and the right pane shows a list of all the posts for that feed. Click on a feed, and the right pane is filled with the text of the post. There are handy buttons for moving to the next post (or previous post). As you read posts, or as new ones come in, the feed names swoosh around in their column like screen names in iChat. (Why did I feel the need to explain that? If you're a Mac OS X user, you already know what I'm talking about. If you're not, you wrote me off as a Mac weenie and stopped reading a long time ago. I have learned that a great way to get out of annoying conversations is to say "This one time, on my Macintosh...".) I can't do it justice in words. Go look for yourself.

Okay, so you're thinking, if NewsFire is all that, why do you keep referring to it in the past tense? It turns out that NewsFire decided I was that person it didn't want to be around.

I jumped on the NewsFire bandwagon when it was still in beta—I forget how early, but it was a pretty small number. Every once in a while—fairly often, in fact; David Watanabe was doing a great job of fixing bugs and adding features—it would pop a box saying that a new version was available and I should download it. Fine, I said, download away. And install away. Who doesn't like new versions?

Then, one day, immediately after installing a new version, NewsFire popped a new box—the old "pay up and I'll go away" nag dialog. Fine, David always said it wouldn't be free forever, and I'm in favor of paying for software if it's sweet, sweet software. Which NewsFire was. Except that it wouldn't allow me to add more feeds, at least not until I deleted all but 10 of the ones I already had. (I told you I had a compulsion.) And it kept popping the nag dialog. Every. Thirty. Minutes.

That alone probably wouldn't have made me stop using NewsFire—that took an intervention of one—but it made it easier. I recall that David caught several windstorms-worth of crap via email over this, which he attempted to rationalize in his blog:

It has been noted that NewsFire has “unexpectedly” made the transition from “freeware” to shareware. I put “freeware” in quotes because it never was freeware, and I never said it was freeware - it was in a public beta release. Its eventual transition to shareware was always planned and this plan has always been public knowledge. I put “unexpected” in quotes because this was publicly known since NewsFire version 0.1 in August 2004.

I can't speak for everyone else who complained; I for one knew it was not freeware. My quibble is that he should have put "eventual" in quotes. Or perhaps "transition". Or perhaps "publicly known". "Unexpectedly" certainly does not belong in quotes. I don't recall any kind of warning like, "hey folks, come version 1.0 you're going to need to start paying". Instead, it was "here's a new version", then bang, you're locked out of your feed list and you're being nagged. Every. Thirty. Minutes.

Still, like some daytime talk show reject, I came back for more this go-round. Maybe it's different, I thought.

Wrong. It still looks good enough to eat, but now it has deleted all but maybe 10 of my feeds (with, I assume, no hope of recovery, which is not necessarily a bad thing, since I had so many, but that should be my choice to make, shouldn't it?) and it still nags. Every. Thirty. Minutes. I even set the refresh interval to once per day—I really shouldn't be refreshing more than that; I have a compulsion, remember?—but it still nags. Every. Thirty. Minutes.

So, NewsFire gets left by the curb, without cab fare even. And in waltzes....

PulpFiction.

It looks as good as I remember, but boy howdy, has the performance improved. It even comes in a less-featureful free version that is, well, less featureful, but at least it doesn't get in your face all the time and beg to be appreciated. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles that NewsFire does, and I have no doubt that every once in a while we're going to quarrel. But you know what? I think it's going to be okay. It's just good enough that I'll probably use it every day.

And here's the lesson for David Watanabe, which I hope he'll see when he Googles himself and NewsFire and clicks through nineteen pages of other results to find this, because my PageRank is undoubtedly crap:

It's just good enough that I'll probably pay for the full version.

Daddy can fix anything

2005-08-23T11:43:00.000-05:00

At least, that's the running joke in our family. I don't recall how it started—possibly it was our daughter's response to my fixing some malfunctioning toy by replacing the batteries.

While I won't suggest that it's a factual statement, there is some truth to it. My father used to do all the work on his own cars (even things like replacing clutches), and somewhere along the way I must have picked up some skills via osmosis. I can't do as much of my own work as I'd like—it rankles me a little to have to pay someone else to change my oil, but it's just too blasted difficult to get to the oil filter on my Honda Civic, and I'd still have to go to someone to dispose of the used oil—but I can do things like replace air filters, light bulbs, and spark plugs. I have even done brake jobs (but not anymore—the safety of my wife and daughter is not worth saving a few bucks).

Yesterday afternoon, the Saturn wouldn't start. You'd turn the key and the dash lights would come on and the starter solenoid would click, but the engine wouldn't turn over. My first thought was that the starter was shot, and since that's way out of my league, we'd have to pay to have it towed to the dealer. (Aside: The Saturn L200 is a nice little car, most of the time. We've had trouble with the fuel pump since day one, but the dealer claims they can't find the problem, so we've just learned to not let the gas level drop lower than 1/4 full, and not to park on hills when it does. There have been a few other problems with it which escape my recollection at the moment, but every time I've said to myself, "my Civic is ten years older, and it's never had this problem.")

The more I thought about it, the more liked the idea that it was much simpler than the starter—like the battery. I decided to take a flyer, bought a new battery, and installed it. (Which was much harder than it should have been. Saturn is now second on my list of "cars which are much harder to work on than they should be", behind Ford. I had to Google for how to remove the battery. For the sake of posterity: To remove the battery from a 2002 Saturn L200 sedan, remove the little black box in front of the battery, and you'll find a bolt holding down a clamp that holds down the battery.) Presto! It starts now.

Nothing like saving who-knows-how-much on a tow to the dealer, plus at least $75 in labor alone, to brighten your day a little.

I have a blog buddy!

2005-08-12T20:34:00.000-05:00

I got my first blog comment today. Better yet, my new blog buddy is my sushi buddy!

If you knew sushi like I know sushi....

2005-08-12T19:58:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm not going to claim that I'm some kind of sushi connoisseur, but I like squid, I don't dislike uni, and I'm willing to try natto. Unfortunately, I'm in the Midwest, where "fish" is usually prefixed by "cat-". Also, my wife doesn't like sushi aside from the occasional California roll, so I don't get the raw stuff very often.

Which is but one reason why I look forward to trips back to the home office outside of Washington DC. Northern Virginia has what appears to this Missouri boy a stunning array of sushi restaurants. They also have something which, to my knowledge, is not available around here at all—the all-you-can-eat sushi lunch.

The first time I heard of one of these, I assumed it was going to be bargain basement—all makizushi like California rolls. To my surprise, at least half was nigirizushi. Granted, it was mostly "entry level" stuff like salmon and tuna, but they also had octopus, surf clam, and mussels.

Today, my sushi buddy and I tackled the place near the office. For once, I decided to count how many pieces of sushi I can eat at one sitting. The answer, it turns out, is 30—and if I'd skipped the tempura sweet potatoes, broccoli, and green beans, and the steamed mussels, I probably could have eaten another five.

That should hold me for another few months.

Enabling Samba access through the firewall

2005-07-27T21:17:00.000-05:00

This isn't going to make any sense to the vast majority of you, and the others will point and laugh at something that can probably be looked up elsewhere. But this is going to come in handy in a few weeks, and I don't want to have to figure it out again.

At home:

    ssh -R 9939:localhost:139 server_alias

On the laptop:

    sudo ssh -L 139:localhost:9939 username_on_server@fully.qualified.server.name

Then connect in the Finder (via Go|Connect to Server...) using:

    smb://localhost/sharename

This is what serendipity gets you

2005-07-27T08:30:00.000-05:00

I'm cleaning out my filing cabinet, and I run across a printout of Web bookmarks from back in 2000. I'm going through them to figure out which ones are still useful, so I can add them to my del.icio.us feed. And I run across this: http://www.nearside.com/.

Yes, the meme is old and creaky. Still, it's a good thing I didn't have a mouthful of coffee when it loaded.

Tending my own garden

2005-07-16T13:46:00.000-05:00

I stumbled across The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag at the library a couple of days ago. I'd heard of the CSS Zen Garden, and the book as well, but while I develop web applications for a living, I've never really gotten deep into the layout and design side. I checked it out on a whim, thinking it would be interesting to leaf through.

Boy, am I ever glad that I did. The best phrase I can think of to describe this book is "a music appreciation course for web design". That, or "the first computer-related coffee table book".

The CSS Zen Garden is a showcase for what web styling can do. It starts with a simple HTML page; all designs have to use it, without modifications. What can be modified is the stylesheet, and it's all about how far each edge of the envelope can be pushed—or not pushed, as the case may be. There are currently 653 different designs, which should be proof enough that the envelope is very, very stretchy.

What I love about the book is that it's not just a portfolio of different designs. It's a primer on the basics of web design, and graphic design in general to some extent. For instance, there's a whole section on color—how to choose an effective color palette (depending on the desired effect), how different colors have different cultural and psychological impacts, and so on. It's probably all Graphic Design 101 stuff, but for those of us who never studied graphic design, yet find ourselves embroiled in it professionally, it's a great read.

And the designs are, well, inspiring. I'm partially responsible for several other websites, and I'm getting fired up about redesigning them. The static HTML for the CSS Zen Garden is valuable on its own as an example of HTML that is flexible enough to be stretched many different directions. That's where I think I'll start.

More weeks, more books

2005-07-16T12:59:00.000-05:00

My plan to read 52 books in 52 weeks ran off the rails, so to speak. I certainly haven't been keeping track very well of what I've been reading and when.

I just returned to the library The Enemy by Lee Child, and Hide & Seek by Ian Rankin. I'm currently leafing through The Zen of CSS Design, which deserves a post of its own. I have four more books waiting at the library. And, of course, the new Harry Potter is waiting to be picked up from Borders.

Week 6/Book 7: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

2005-02-06T09:38:00.000-06:00

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Back in the brewery

2005-02-05T18:28:00.000-06:00

I brewed today for the first time in four months or so. The time and effort required for all-grain brewing took its toll, and I got a little burned out. This time, I bought a kit from my local homebrew shop, and returned to my roots (so to speak).

I got turned off of extract brewing very quickly (I went all-grain on my second batch), due to the mess of dealing with liquid malt extract. This time, armed with that experience, I knew what to expect and wore disposable gloves whenever I was working with the extract. That, and working in the garage, made for a much more enjoyable experience. Being done in an hour or so instead of six hours was very nice, too.

Only one thing didn't go as planned. It had been so long since I'd used my big fermenter that I'd forgotten how much volume it contains, and I topped off the wort to six gallons instead of five. That brought the starting gravity quite a bit lower than it's supposed to be for this style (a doppelbock). I added a little more than a pound of dry malt extract (it was all I had to spare), which should help some. And even if the final result isn't exactly to style, as long as it's drinkable I'll be happy.

Week 5/Book 6: Shutter Island

2005-02-04T21:27:00.000-06:00

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Good quotes day

2005-02-04T13:17:00.000-06:00

B.Greenway writes at Mac HTPC:

I want to preface this review by saying I’m a windows user, have been since 1992 when I bought a 200mhz Intel chip, a barebones case and had a co-worker build me a ‘windows machine’. It blew obviously, and had little of the geek appeal of my first computer an Atari 1200XL (1983’ish). But even back in those days of new wave and Reaganomics, I lusted for an Apple, but apparently St. Nick never got any of my letters pleading for a IIc. Well times have changed and I don’t rely on fat men in red suits for my toys anymore, err today it was a skinny man in a blue uniform, but never mind that. Luckily when I actually set out to buy my own Mac the stars aligned, or at a minimum Steve Job’s bent my reality to make them appear aligned.

From Fraser Speirs:

[T]he thing that keeps me Perl for life is this: if there's even the remotest possibility that someone will have thought of this problem before you, there's a 99% chance that there's a CPAN module to help you out.

In the short time I've been playing with Ruby, that's the only thing I've missed from Perl.

It's all been done before

2005-01-31T09:31:00.000-06:00

Dion Almaer blogs about adding support for closures to Java iterators, a la Groovy. While it certainly is a neat idea, if he'd checked the documentation for Jakarta Common-Collections, he'd have discovered that it's already been done.

Week 4/Book 5: Fermat's Enigma

2005-01-29T11:20:00.000-06:00

Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh

Week 3/Book 4: Next

2005-01-29T11:19:00.000-06:00

Next: The Future Just Happened by Michael Lewis

Week 2/Book 3: Flight

2005-01-29T11:18:00.000-06:00

Flight: My Life in Mission Control by Chris Kraft

The hardest thing about 52 books/52 weeks

2005-01-25T17:23:00.000-06:00

It's not the reading, believe it or not. It's reporting the results here. I thought that this reading project would get me to blog more regularly; instead, my poor blogging habit is interfering with the project.

I have two more books under my belt that I haven't yet blogged. The problem is, I think, the amount of time it takes me to write up an entry for each book they way I want to. Between writing up a small review (which has always been a time-consuming process for me) and tracking down and generating links to the books (and other resources), it takes me quite a bit of time to blog a book.

I probably need better tools; I definitely need better habits. I used ecto for a while (until the trial period ran out), and I was impressed with it enough that I should purchase a license for it. Unfortunately, my discretionary computing budget has been eaten up lately by the LaserJet IIIP that I've managed to nurse back to health. That, however, is a subject for another blog entry.

The books I've completed but not yet blogged fully:

Week 2/Book 3: Flight: My Life in Mission Control by Chris Kraft
Week 3/Book 4: Next: The Future Just Happened by Michael Lewis

Week 2/Book 2: Time Lord

2005-01-21T19:52:00.000-06:00

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise

(I finished reading this on 16 Jan 2005, so it still counts as week 2 as far as I'm concerned.)

This book starts off like one of Simon Winchester's: A minor anecdote, an event that in passing seems otherwise forgettable, that leads to bigger, better, often world-altering things. Unfortunately, that's about the last time that Time Lord resembles anything by Simon Winchester.

The initial anecdote turns out to be a maguffin. Fleming misses a train (in that day, since there was no standard time, there was no guarantee that noon here was the same as noon 50 miles down the tracks), and this spurs him to create one time standard for the whole world. The problem, unless I misunderstood, is that Fleming missed his train because of a misprinted train schedule (PM was listed, but the train left in the AM), not because of non-standard time.

Only about half of the book has anything directly to do with either Sir Sandford Fleming or the creation of standard time (24 time zones for the entire Earth, with noon defined at Greenwich Observatory in London). The rest of the time, the author waxes rhapsodically on time, the passage of time, what time meant to those who lived through the Industrial Revolution and to those of us living today…. We learn a fair amount about Fleming, from his emigration as a young man from Scotland to Canada, to a career of civil engineering (building many of the railroad miles in eastern Canada), to his eventual knighthood for laying the first around-the-world undersea telegraph cable. Amidst all of this the creation of standard time seems almost an afterthought, and in fact his role in it seems minor. The United States had already standardized on four time zones (very similar to the present-day ones) several years prior, and many of Fleming's proposals to the conference that defined standard time were voted down.

So why, then, does the author give Fleming the title of the book, yet such short shrift inside it? In the afterword, we learn that Blaise, Canadian by birth, was writing a personal memoir at the age of 57 when the words "time zones" leapt off the page at him:

And I wondered, idly, why do those words suddenly seem strange, where did a term like "time zone" originate? The encyclopedia informed me that time zones were born with the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884, in which standard time for the world was decided. The leader of the movement was a fifty-seven-year-old(!) Canadian(!) named Sandford Fleming. [Punctuation in the original.]

So in the end, this book is not so much about Sir Sandford Fleming as it is about time itself, and about the author himself.

Stickies

2005-01-19T10:40:00.000-06:00

I'm starting to accumulate "things to remember" here, so I might as well put links to them all in one place. (In case anyone from Google/Blogger is reading this, it would be nice if I could assign categories to my posts.)

Starting and stopping Oracle

2005-01-19T10:37:00.000-06:00

This isn't going to make any sense to the vast majority of you, and the others will point and laugh at something that can probably be looked up elsewhere. But I've been carrying this little piece of paper around for almost a year now, so I figure it must be important enough to write down somewhere a little more permanent.

Stopping Oracle:

    sudo su - oracle
    lsnrctl stop
    sqlplus /nolog
    connect sys as sysdba    # any password should do
    shutdown immediate;
    exit

Starting Oracle:

    sudo su - oracle
    sqlplus /nolog
    connect sys as sysdba    # any password should do
    startup
    exit
    lsnrctl start

scooter, RIP

2005-01-15T23:41:00.000-06:00

Scooter, my nearly-10-year-old Power Macintosh 7200/90, is dead, for the second time in its life. The faulty part, again for the second time, appears to be a failed hard drive. The difference this time, and the reason that it may not come back for a third shot at immortality, is simple economics. Then, a new SCSI drive was just expensive; now, assuming the prices I saw a couple of months ago were realistic and representative, a new SCSI drive is prohibitively expensive, especially for a 90MHz PowerPC 601 with 40MB of RAM.

I haven't given up completely yet. Sonnet (at least) makes an IDE adapter from which the 7200 can boot, and I have several drives currently sitting in storage. So, maybe, for now we should just say that "it's not dead; it's merely resting."

52 Books/52 Weeks update

2005-01-15T23:39:00.000-06:00

Okay, so it's the end of week 2, and I haven't finished my second book. That doesn't mean I'm falling behind, or that I've given up. I'm currently reading two books, and expect to finish at least one of them tomorrow.

Week 1/Book 1: Brilliance of the Moon

2005-01-06T21:44:00.000-06:00

Brilliance of the Moon by Lian Hearn

I read Across the Nightingale Floor not long after it came out, and was immediately entranced. Then, somehow, I managed to forget that two more books were planned to follow, and it passed into memory. A month or so ago, something made me think of it again, so I checked with the library, and saw that all three books had been published. I decided to reread Nightingale, to get it fresh in my mind, then read Grass for His Pillow immediately thereafter. Tonight, I finished the third book, Brilliance of the Moon.

I don't suppose that there's a lot I can say about the story itself without giving too much away. These three books (collectively called The Tales of the Otori) comprise, I think, the best historical fantasy since Lord of the Rings. In at least two ways, they're better:

TotO is shorter than LotR, so you feel less overwhelmed before starting and less exhausted after finishing.
Though I called both "historical fantasy", TotO is less fantasy—in fact, there's only enough fantasy that I can't not call it fantasy, if that makes any sense. LotR, on the other hand, is fantasy through and through. It's a personal prejudice, I realize, but I'm a fan of LotR despite its being fantasy, not because of it.

Enough heresy for now. :-)

I had the same feeling at the end of Brilliance of the Moon that I have too often, especially with stories of this scope—that feeling that everything comes crashing to a halt, instead of gliding smoothly to a stop. Since I'm the only person who seems to say anything about this, I'm going to suggest that maybe it's me.

The only other quibble I'll raise at this point is that Brilliance of the Moon brought the world of TotO too close to our own. Throughout all three books, references are made to "the Hidden"—those who believe in "one true God" who recognizes all persons as equals, in contrast to the rigid class system that pervades everyday life. The parallels to Christianity and feudal Japan are obvious, but not obtrusively so. In the third book, however, we learn that the "secret sign" of the Hidden is... a cross. At this point, it was no longer possible to pretend that the world of TotO was a different world, a lot like ours but not ours. (Actually, that point came a page or two earlier, with the appearance—sort of— of a "barbarian from the mainland", with skin "white as an oyster" and yellow hair. There's a third thing presented at the same time, but I'm not sharing it here.) The "and it was really feudal Japan all along!" feeling took a few more pages from which to recover.

But recover I did, and I'm glad I did. I don't know that TotO needs either prequel or sequel, but I hope Hearn has more tales to tell.

Next up: I'm working on Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time by Clark Blaise, and Flight: My Life in Mission Control by Chris Kraft.

Geek cheesecake

2005-01-06T10:34:00.000-06:00

Angela brought the mail in yesterday, and asked me if I wanted to keep the new Micro Center or dump it straight in the recycling bin. "Keep it." I said. "We don't get Victoria's Secret catalogs anymore."

52 books in 52 weeks

2005-01-03T10:36:00.000-06:00

David at Largehearted Boy read 52 books in 52 weeks in 2004. Jason at kottke.org tried it with magazines, but apparently failed. Maybe I'm a bit arrogant, but I'm thinking I can do this (with books) ~~with my eyes closed~~ without hardly trying. I'm pretty sure that I read more than 52 books last year, but I didn't keep records, so this year I'm going to list them here.

I've always been a voracious reader, but my reading rate has gone up since I discovered the Olathe Public Library's online catalog. I've kept a "to read" list for years, and thanks to the many blogs I've started reading regularly, it has (I think) been growing rather than shrinking. The biggest problem I had in the past was finding books on my list—I would visit one of the local library branches with a hardcopy of my list in hand, then scour the shelves for whichever books they happened to have at that branch. Now, thanks to the online catalog, I can reserve a book from home and they'll shuttle it to the branch of my choice.

I don't know what rules David or Jason set to follow for this challenge, so I guess I'll have to make my own.

Only books read entirely in 2005 count. I ended 2004 with two books on my nightstand—Why Toast Lands Jelly-Side Down by Robert Ehrlich, and Four to Score by Janet Evanovich—but since I had already started reading them, they won't count for 2005.
Only books that I haven't read before will count. I don't reread many books these days, but I received three of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone novels (G Is for Gumshoe, H Is for Homicide, and I Is for Innocent) for Christmas, so I'll be starting over from the beginning of the series now that my collection is complete (to date).
A book counts towards the total when I finish it.
The goal is not to finish 52 books in 2005, but to finish at least one each week, which ends on Saturday.

First up is Brilliance of the Moon by Lian Hearn.

Breaking the build

2004-12-29T14:42:00.000-06:00

Andy Marks talks about determining how broken your build is. Two solutions are offered separately, in separate blogs:

Vincent Massol wants to make the build unbreakable.
Cedric Beust wants to keep developers from performing the build.

I think that Cedric means "full product build", and in that sense I think he's right. The last time I worked for a company large enough to have dedicated configuration management staff, they were responsible for the shipping build—not the developers. Unfortunately, many of us work for companies or organizations so small we barely have a development team, much less a dedicated CM team.

I really like Vincent's idea. The thing that's a little scary about it is the asynchronous nature of the SCM commit—I don't know if that's possible with current tools. I may have to play with this idea once I get a continuous integration server running locally.

How to fix Mom's computer

2004-12-29T13:55:00.000-06:00

Thank you, Gina, thank you for your guide to cleaning up a Windows box. I haven't used Windows for anything more than compatibility testing for over four years now, so I've lost whatever mad skillz I may have had in that department. With this guide in hand, I'm cleaning up my wife's computer. I'll also be sending it to my father (for fixing Mom's computer) and my brother-in-law (his mother has been complaining of problems with her computer).

(Then again, the last Windows box in our house may become a thing of the past, if rumors of a sub-US$600 iMac come to pass.)

Christmas, apparently, is over.

2004-12-29T13:24:00.000-06:00

Our tree just fell over, still fully loaded with ornaments. So far, it looks like we lost only one glass ball, but until I can put the tree back upright, we won't know for sure.

It... is... alive!

2004-12-12T15:38:00.000-06:00

Some time back (I can tell already that this entry is going to get edited a lot) the backlight in my laptop died. Normally, this would be a problem——what good is a laptop if you can't see what you're doing?—but, as it's a PowerBook G3 Firewire, I plugged in the monitor on my desk and went on with that. (I did have to configure the external monitor as a mirror of the dead display, which involved shining a bright light on the display so as to see what my mouse was doing, but I digress.) Since I don't have a wireless network, and both batteries for the laptop are dead, I was pretty much tethered to my desk anyway.

I've been meaning all this time to replace the backlight. In anticipation of an upcoming business trip, I finally knuckled down and did so today. It wasn't as hard as I expected it to be. Now, a couple of hours later, I've got a working laptop display. I'd forgotten how bright and crisp this thing could be. The old display had been suffering from the PowerBook "pink screen of pain" for some time, and I'm happy to report that it's gone, gone, gone.

Heaping helpings of gratitude, for making this job possible, easier, and more enjoyable, go out to:

the unfortunately departed website of "Scadboy" at http://homepage.mac.com/scadboy/lcd/, without which I never would have had the courage to attempt this myself
js_30 on eBay, who sold me a display inverter board, at a reasonable price
PowerBook Tech, who sold me a new backlight (shipped as a known-busted display with a working backlight attached to it), also at a reasonable price
the disassembly guide at PBFixIt, which made removing the lid and display from my PowerBook much easier than if I'd tried to figure it out myself
Connie Dover and Scartaglen, Sarah McLachlan, and Depeche Mode for providing the soundtrack

Whose life is it, anyway?

2004-12-08T12:23:00.000-06:00

A Massachusetts telecom company is offering unlimited VoIP calls for life. What's left unsaid is whether that's your life, or theirs. (Thanks to A Welsh View for the link.)

A jukebox of my own

2004-12-08T10:04:00.000-06:00

For the fourth or fifth time, I'm ripping our CD collection to MP3s. The first time I did this, I burned them to CDs to take to work. That was before I learned about ID3 tags, so they're basically a jumbled mess of files that depend on the file system for structure and identification.

The second, third, and possibly fourth times (I lost track somewhere) I ended up having to dump the MP3s to make room for something more important (and more ephemeral—at least the MP3s are backed by CDs). We have a decent amount of hard drive storage in the house; the problem is that it's spread out over 10 or so disks. That, and I could never figure out how to get iTunes to look both on my local drive and a remote drive for MP3s.

A couple of weeks back, I bought an 80GB drive for a terrific price after rebate. Even after replacing the three drives in my Linux box with this new one, I still have plenty of space left over. Enough, in fact, to comfortably hold our entire CD collection as MP3s.

Last night, the final piece fell into place—I finally figured out how to turn the Linux box into an iTunes server. There are instructions to be found in several places around the Web, but the simplest turned out to be from the guy who built a Debian package for the necessary software. One thing I had to figure out on my own is that the path to the MP3 directory in /etc/daapd.conf can't contain spaces—even if you escape them with backslashes.

Picking knits

2004-12-08T09:31:00.000-06:00

Shortly before Halloween, links to the Hallowig—a knitted yarn wig—made their way around the blogosphere. Now, those wacky crafters at knitty.com are back with another, um, unusual project: a knitted yarn model of the human female reproductive organs. (Internal, not external. This is a (mostly) family-friendly blog.)

Angela just had her first knitting lesson on Monday, and while I'm not anticipating a spate of wigs or uteri any time soon, I do think it would be cool to have a knitted Tux for the top of my monitor.

Breaking News: Slashdot Reviews Flickr

2004-12-02T19:07:00.000-06:00

Slashdot | Flickr Online Photo Service Reviewed.

In related news, Slashdot commenters prove once again that they just don't get it.

This... makes my head hurt

2004-12-02T15:29:00.000-06:00

Inverting the Inversion of Control. (Warning: nerdy by nature.)

Worst. Holiday specials. Ever.

2004-12-02T15:15:00.000-06:00

Whatever: The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

A marriage made in heaven?

2004-12-02T11:41:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I had one of those "million dollar" revelations that I occasionally have. The problem is, that I invariably have them too late to do anything about them. (This explains why I'm still working for someone else instead of sitting on a beach, drinking beer and getting a tan. But I digress.) Nevertheless, I'm still going to commit this one to the ages, so if it comes to pass I can point at it and say, "Look how smart I am!".

The latest rage seems to be Microsoft's Media Center PCs—computers that integrate into your home entertainment system, bringing the multimedia capabilities of modern PCs to the living room. With one of these, you can (I gather; I haven't seen one of these in person yet) play CDs, MP3s, DVDs, and PC games, view photos, and probably just about anything else that doesn't require a keyboard, while sitting on your sofa. The display is your TV, and the input device is a remote control. Built-in networking means that you're not limited to what's on the Media Center PC; you can pull data from any other computer on the network.

This feels like it's smack in the middle of the "digital convergence" space that Apple has been talking about for several years now. As a result, one is starting to hear rumblings about when they're going to move into this market. For example, The Register reports that "Merrill Lynch looks to 'killer' Apple home media server". This is why I figure that I'm too late with this idea; I suspect that Apple either has soemthing in the works already, or has decided to move in a completely different direction altogether.

Almost everything Media Center PCs can do, Apple hardware and software can also do, today. (I have used a 1999-era Powerbook as a DVD deck for our TV and an MP3 jukebox for our stereo in the past.) The only things missing that I can think of are the ability to run PC games, the hi-fi stack form factor, and the TV/remote control interface. I'm not going to spend any time on the first one; PC games won't run on Macintosh hardware, and while some games have Macintosh versions, many more don't. We're going to have to write this one off as unsolvable—although I have a peripheral idea that I'll get to at the end, assuming I remember to.

Apple tried the stereo component form factor before, with the Pippin. It failed to go anywhere, probably as much for being ahead of its time as anything else. Nevertheless, there's no magic in this form factor; it's just a laptop without a display or keyboard, and with more (but not substantially different) jacks and sockets. There's no technical reason Apple couldn't produce a Macintosh in a stereo component box.

As far as the TV/remote control interface goes, very few companies do user interface like Apple. They're not perfect—just ask Tog—but in my (admittedly biased) opinion, they know how to do simple, clean, usable interfaces. Just as important, they recognize good interfaces when others create them, and put them to good use; for instance, the iPod interface originally came from Pixo. So, while Apple could produce their own interface for a "digital convergence hub", I think they'd be better off turning to another company who has already done it, and done it well.

TiVo.

The CPU in TiVo PVRs is the PowerPC, same as in Macintosh. They run Linux, but I suspect that it could be replaced with Darwin (the foundation of Mac OS X). (Conversely, the Mac OS X applications that would power such a box could probably be ported to Linux without much difficulty. I'm not saying we'll ever see Linux versions of them outside of any such box, but porting from Darwin to Linux should be a lot easier than, say, porting from Darwin to Windows.) Series 2 TiVos already have many of the hardware bits necessary to make this work, so all that really remains is to get Apple and TiVo together.

Imagine that Apple licenses the hardware reference design and software from TiVo. They add the "digital convergence" applications that already exist—iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, GarageBand. Put Apple and TiVo logos on the front. Call it "iTiVo". Watch them sell like iPods. :-)

I've got some ideas for some new synergies that could come out of this, but I'm already running long. Two final thoughts, one of which was referenced above.

Series 2 TiVos have jacks for cable TV and Ethernet. Add a wireless Ethernet connection (and why wouldn't you?) and cable modem hardware and you have a broadband router/firewall for the whole house.
Remember how I said that a Macintosh-based box can't run PC games? While you could do it by emulating a PC in software, I doubt that the performance would be acceptable. Instead, consider that gaming consoles like the PlayStation/2 could probably be condensed to the size of a PCI card....

Barenaked Ladies: Barenaked for the Holidays

2004-12-01T20:22:00.000-06:00

Our holiday CD this year is Barenaked for the Holidays by Barenaked Ladies, and let me tell you, this may be the holiday CD to end all holiday CDs. On one (one!) CD they give us:

a rendition "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" recorded backstage at a concert (with guest vocals by Sarah McLachlan)
"Green Christmas" from the soundtrack to How the Grinch Stole Christmas
their own version of "Do They Know It's Christmas" that, while sounding sincere, makes you think that they're poking fun at Bob Geldof
"Jingle Bells" and "O Holy Night" performed on the Hammond organ (Angela's reaction: "It sounds like they're at a baseball game")
and "Deck the Stills"—the tune is "Deck the Halls", but the words are "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young" repeated over and over

That last one has to be heard to be believed.

Enabling SSH access through the firewall

2004-11-30T23:10:00.000-06:00

This isn't going to make any sense to the vast majority of you, and the others will point and laugh at something that can be looked up elsewhere. But I've been carrying this little piece of paper around for almost a year now, so I figure it must be important enough to write down somewhere a little more permanent.

At home:

    ssh -R 9722:localhost:22 servername

On the server:

    ssh -p 9722 username@localhost

How to de-stink a Volvo

2004-11-30T10:29:00.000-06:00

From David Weinberger: How to de-stink a Volvo. It reminds me of how Dave Barry used to write:

Our Volvo has heated seats ("The Warm Ass that Cluetrain Bought"), so you have to remove some electrical bits first. On the bottom of the seat are two black boxes, each held on by a single torx screw. Remove and deposit at the bottom of a storm drain, just to teach yourself a lesson.

Trying out ecto

2004-11-28T23:29:00.000-06:00

I'm giving ecto a spin 'round the block. Not that expect a fancy tool to make my blog posts any more interesting... or frequent, for that matter.

And so it begins

2004-11-26T19:39:00.000-06:00

The turkey carcass is barely cold, and we already have our Christmas tree. We took advantage of the fact that we have an SUV for the week (long story, not worth repeating) to save ourselves the trouble of trying to cram it in the trunk of my Civic this year.

One bittersweet note is that our favorite tree farm is closing its doors (gates?) after this season. Granted, we've gotten a fir, imported from Michigan or some such, every year for the past 5 or so instead of a locally-grown Scotch pine (we got tired of the itchy, swollen hands that result from trimming the latter, with its stubby, inflexible needles). We should be able to go just about anywhere to get a fir, imported from Michigan or some such. Anywhere else we go, however, is going to lack the atmosphere that Warren's has. They will be missed.

We got snow

2004-11-25T14:41:00.000-06:00

That's not why I didn't post yesterday. Yesterday was spent running around making preparations for today.

This wasn't just a light dusting of snow, either. We got about 6 inches. Not a bad way to start the holiday season.

First pass at the new layout

2004-11-24T01:52:00.000-06:00

It's still a little rough, but it's most of the way there. Serious thanks to Tonico Strasser for his flexible layout; the good stuff is his, while any CSS bogosity is all mine.

We're all nit-pickers about something

2004-11-23T17:46:00.000-06:00

My wife used to hate watching a movie with me where computers figure prominently in the story line. (That's probably incorrect. I'm sure she still hates it, but doesn't bother complaining to me anymore.) I've been a computer professional for about 15 years, and an enthusiast for almost 25, so I have a hard time suspending my disbelief long enough to swallow some of the computer-related nonsense we're shown—and a harder time keeping quiet about it. (I'll refrain from posting any specific examples; if you know computers, I'm sure you can think of your own examples. If you don't, a simple rule of thumb is this: If you find yourself asking, "Can computers really do that?", the answer is usually "no".)

Not that she's entirely guiltless herself. She used to work in television, so that's her area of relative expertise, and the topic for which she can't let inaccurate representations slide. I remember when we saw Up Close and Personal, and Michelle Pfeiffer's character broadcasts live from deep within a prison during a riot. My wife kept shaking her head. "How are they transmitting live footage? They left the live truck outside the prison walls. Did they drag cables all the way with them? If so, where are the cables?"

I bring this up because, well, I can. Someone once said that everyone is an expert on something. (According to Google, apparently everyone has said this.) And whatever you're expert at, you can nit-pick at.

Case in point. Mark Simonson, a professional font designer (and, therefore, an expert on typography), has catalogued on his website "the use (and misuse) of period typography in movies". In other words, what he notices is whether a movie set in the 1950's shows a typeface that wasn't designed until the 1980's.

An expert after my own heart.

It's beginning to smell a lot like...

2004-11-23T15:10:00.000-06:00

I'm not going to finish that. It's bad enough that I'm alluding to (Holiday+1).

We've had a zip-top bag full of cinnamon sticks in the cabinet for several years now, waiting for a reason to use them. Now we have a reason, but we figured they're probably too old, so we bought a fresh new bag at Penzey's. It seemed a shame to throw out the old ones—just because they're old doesn't mean they're worthless—so I dropped five or six of them into a pan of water simmering on the stove. Instant ambiance!

Some of my 43 Things

2004-11-22T21:12:00.000-06:00

I've started making my list. Have you?