Radios Appear

More than two decades, in fact, though most of the earliest stuff was on borrowed accounts--I don't think I had my own email address until twenty years ago next year.

The funny thing is that there are people I know from my very earliest ventures on the 'net with whom I still cross paths.

In no particular order:

Steven Grimm, who is now a member of Facebook's infrastructure team working on memcached (which we use very extensively at Ironic Design) was very active in the Atari ST community back when I was first getting on the net.

Howard Chu was, if I remember correctly, responsible for both the largest FTP repository of Atari ST freeware up at terminator.cc.umich.edu (for which I used to know the IP address, because DNS was not reliable in those days), as well as handling the porting of the Gnu C compiler to STOS. This is what I learned to write C in. These days, he is the primary coder on the OpenLDAP server (which we use very extensively at Ironic Design).

David Parsons was part of the community when I started reading newsgroups, and worked on the STadel port of the Citadel BBS software to the Atari ST. I ran across a reference to his C reimplementation of the Markdown text-processing language.

Now my current connection to orc is more tenuous than the others, but the idea that these people I have known of for twenty years are still involved in software that I used and depend on on a daily basis...it's kinda weird.

So, a friend on facebook posted this, and it pisses me off enough that I really need to vent:

I've held my tongue about a lot of the anti-flu-vaccine talk that's been flying around because while I think it is pretty baseless, ehh, it's the flu, who cares--as long as you're pretty healthy going into it, you're going to endure a week of feeling like crap, and maybe if you're unlucky, a nice bout of pneumonia.

(Hopefully not a multi-drug resistant strain, in which case you might be screwed, since it's always been true that it's usually follow-on infections that kill you, rather than the flu itself)

Anyway, I, myself, am very inconsistent about getting vaccinated--sometimes I do, sometimes I don't--so I'm not going to whine at people to go do it.

However, I draw the line at anyone who believes all vaccinations are bad--as the person who captioned this video does, and as many, many people going on about not getting the H1N1 vaccination give the impression of believing--is at best, spectacularly ignorant.

At worst, they're a Dangerous Fucking Idiot.

Don't believe me? Two words: smallpox, polio.

Go research those, and understand that vaccines are too important a tool for their application to be governed by knee-jerk reactions either for or against, and if you're helping to create an environment where people are fearful of vaccines, one day it is going to backfire when something much worse than mere flu comes along.

I feel like I am living in the 18th century when it comes to this shit. I have no love of Big Pharma, but fucking-A, people, sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt like this is neither helpful nor productive.

I think it's clear that their work is of a piece--wildly innovative, to the point of being totally incomprehensible--so it should come as no surprise that Frank Zappa and Jack Kirby not only knew each other, but apparently hung out a bit

Via

Jim Henley has a post that points to and condenses a couple of other posts that I think do a great job articulating the fundamental difference between health insurance and other types of insurance.

I think that understanding that health insurance is a fundamentally different beast from, say, your car insurance is an important part of being able to have a rational conversation about what an appropriate place for the government might (or might not) be.

I also think he makes a clear statement of why the individual insurance model doesn't seem to work; while you may not agree with his conclusion as to the appropriate response, I think he lays out the choices one has clearly and pretty inarguably.

I was listening to Jeff Buckley's Grace, and was looking for lyrics to "Mojo Pin", and my quick google search included a link to a youtube video of a live performance video. From there, I followed a link to footage from the same performance of Last Goodbye because, you know, it's a lovely song.

And then things started to get weird.

See, that had a link to a video of Scarlett Johanssen doing a cover of Tom Waits' Yesterday is Here. There was no way I couldn't check that out. Somewhat to my surprise, I was not repulsed.

From there, I follwed a link to a cover of the same song by Cat Power. Didn't care for that one as much, but oh what it led me to: The Flaming Lips & Cat Power performing a pretty good cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, which in turn led to video of TFL doing it with Peaches, which was interesting mostly for its oddity (the audio quality bites, too).

But the TFL & Cat Power video also had a link to Sabbath performing it in Paris in 1970. That's pretty powerful.

It is also amusing to know that Ozzy's stage act hasn't changed a bit in 40 years.

The old grinder broke. It probably wasn't more than a year old, but what do you expect when the most abused part of the machine (the doser lever) is plastic? Just another reason I will never buy anything with the name Gaggia on it again (the espresso machine being the other).

I did a quick check on the web, and no one would admit to having the parts I'd need to repair it, so I did a little modification with a Dremel to make it usable for a while, until I could figure out what to replace it with. Of course, a friend who has the same model and had the same breakage later told me that he was able to get replacement parts. Oh, well.

I spent several hours researching on home-barista.com. I can no longer find the gigantic head-to-head comparison series one of the founders of the site did from a couple of years ago, but I read it last Friday, and was all set to buy a $900 Macap grinder...when I stumbled across a message from the same guy suggesting that if you were doing low-volume work but wanted a good grinder—noisy, messy and slow, but with very consistent, very good results—you should consider one of a trio of low-cost grinders all using the same conical burr system.

Not many places seem to carry them, but I found a place that had the Ascaso/Innova I-2 grinder. When I showed Anne the one with the cow pattern paint job, well, we figured that if it was only decent, for $255, we had done OK.

I am pleased to say it is far more than decent. It is certainly better than the Gaggia MDF it is replacing. It took a while to dial in the grind, and the burrs will certainly become more seasoned over time, but even so, it is already pulling better shots, and the doserless form factor makes for less waste and less mess for a household that has maybe five shots pulled in a day.

I don't pretend to be a super-taster or even particularly sophisticated about my espresso making, but even if this is only taking us to an "above-average" place, well, it's definitely taken us up the scale. I now do believe it when the serious espresso guys talk about the grinder being the single biggest variable you can control in the quality of the coffee that you get from a particular bean.

Last week the last collected edition (#13) of 100 Bullets arrived. So I started back at the beginning and read all the way through.

This is not a shiny, happy story. To give you an idea, if you look at the Wikipedia page listing the main characters, there are only three who are not at least presumed deceased, and of the ones who are marked indeterminate, I, personally, would only consider one of those to be truly likely.

Even though stories like that usually aren't to my taste, I found it a compulsive page-turner. It starts off as if it's going to be a too-clever sort of a morality play repeated ad-infinitum, and just when you think it's not worth proceeding, you're shown that there's a lot more going on than you realize.

Azarello's scripting is tight—nothing is wasted, with what seems to be throwaway background action in one arc becoming part of the foreground in another—and his feel for how real people speak never rang false for me. The characters are posessed of their own idiosyncracies, feeling true and in some cases worthy of compassion. And Azarello's not afraid to surprise you—something that I'm sure was made easier by having a well-defined end-point in mind when he started.

Risso's art is the bomb. Having the same artist for the entire run is helpful because it gives the characters a sense of more concrete identity—even during flashbacks or after dramatic personal changes, they remain easily recognized. And his economy of line is brilliant—it is as if Frank Miller had taken his best approach to fine line-art (from Elektra Lives Again or thereabouts) and then continued down that path, creating a vocabulary that is expressive, compelling, and versatile.

Definitely worth a read.

When someone undertakes something for fun, or out of passion or deep commitment, the end result is often, I think, more reflective of them personally.

This is generally true of Free Software, and in the Free Software universe, I think this is sometimes even more true of documentation—you're not obligated to write it, no one's paying you, few people enjoy writing docs, so if you're doing it at all, it's because you believe.

So the writers' personalities and convictions show through just a little bit more, Like this bit from Dave Rolsky with whom I am slightly acquainted. Contained within Moose::Cookbook::Basics::Recipe10 I ran across this gem:

Our Human class uses operator overloading to allow us to "add" two humans together and produce a child. Our implementation does require that the two objects be of opposite genders. Remember, we're talking about biological reproduction, not marriage.

Brilliant.

that as my grandfather was dying, I was probably talking about him—my dad had mentioned that he stopped eating at the beginning of the week, so it wasn't like I didn't know it would be soon.

Still, for class yesterday, I had had a notion to talk about something else, and gotten it all planned out in my head, and when I sat down that all pretty much went out the window, and I really ended up talking about my relationship with my grandfather.

Well, not directly, because that would have been boring as shit for everyone in the room—but as I talked about the way that we each have the opportunity to form the narrative of our own lives, I was thinking about all the choices I've made, and I've seen how a lot of the ones I've made recently—the more conscious, considered ones—have been made out of a desire to be warmer and more open and more fluid, none of which are what are attributes immediately called to mind when I think of my grandfather.

Which is not to suggest that I don't love him, but I was always intimidated by his presence when I was younger, and by the time I was old enough that I could have gotten past that, well, it was too late.

I do envy my sister's kids a little, though—they are all having a great opportunity to have close, long-standing relationships with their grandparents, and I think they will value that immensely as they grow older.

So, over Memorial Day Weekend, instead of getting together with people (well, there was some of that) or cooking a bunch of food (though there was some of that, too), I organized my comics.

I am embarassed how many I have—I have, somewhat unfortunately, gotten back into the habit of reading them, and damn if they don't pile up. But for the last couple of years, I have not been in the habit of keeping them organized. Things got shoved in boxes or stacked up on boxes or generally just hidden and neglected. Finding things was a non-starter unless I was feeling absurdly energetic.

So I got them all organized this weekend (which is also the first step in trying to divest myself of a lot of them).

Having, for the first time in a long time, the ability to go back and re-read things in a continuous stream that I had previously only read in short temporally discontinuous bursts, I've been re-reading some stuff. Since I go to the trouble to pay $20/month for the virtual server to host this blog, it seems like I should use it, so I may review some things here.

Fables, by Bill Willingham¹, was the first thing I read through. It's taken me a couple of days to get through the 80+ issues.

The good news is that I liked it—sometimes it's easy to lose that basic perspective when you're taking something in a couple dozen pages at a time separated by weeks.

In terms of storytelling, it doesn't really hit its stride until the second story arc, where it becomes obvious that it's not going to just be a lighthearted romp. And it doesn't find its emotional core until Storybook Love. But Willingham, with consistent artist Mark Buckingham, have come to work as a great team.

And I have to give props to Willingham—there are elements that he planted within the first dozen issues that are just now coming to fruition; characters I was utterly unaware of have suddenly become monumentally important—though, I have to admit, I feel like the current storyline ("The Great Fables Crossover"—and yes I think they are being ironic with that title) is a bit of a diversion from what seemed to be developing. I'm confident that in the end, it will all at least appear intentional.

Anyway, I would recommend this to pretty much anyone. There are people in tights, but they're medieval, not superhero, tights.

¹ I should mention that I remember Bill Willingham from back when he used to do illustrations for TSR—in fact, I think I have a couple of comics from the early 80s that have ads he illustrated on the back covers.