On the impermanence, and importance, of things

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This is one of those infinitely digressive posts.

I refrained from using a metaphor about the induction of Guns ‘n’ Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an avenue for exploring Patanjali’s Sutra 1.9 in class this morning.

But, of course, I mentioned that I had thought about it–because I think people should laugh in yoga class, and think in yoga class and connect with one another in yoga class, because hell, you’re going to have to try and do all of those things at the same time under even more stressful conditions outside of yoga class–which led someone to ask, as we were heading into the home stretch of the practice, how, exactly I had intended to do that?

(The answer is: they created two albums titled Use Your Illusion and then spent more than 15 years working on an album that was perpetually on the cusp of coming out. If I thought Axl Rose was more clever, I would assume that, in fact, this was all an elaborate joke/commentary. As it is, it is a perfect example of how we can convince ourselves of the truth of things that are manifestly unreal.)

(Incidentally, given the rumors of favoritism-verging-on-corruption that always surround the choice of artists to induct, why on earth did they choose G’N'R? They produced maybe one and a half albums of good material 20-odd years ago, were a profound influence on no one of any consequence that I’m aware of, and they were guaranteed to have a contentious appearance if indeed they all showed. Or perhaps I just answered my own question with that last bit. Nothing to drum up interest like controversy.)

Anyway, as I was answering, I flashed on the very first time I saw the video for Welcome to the Jungle. Strangely enough, I can give you an exact date: November 14th, 1987. I can do this because, well, the Internet knows everything, including the date and even the set list of the show KISS played in Pensacola that night.

I was at that show. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

(I have also seen Ratt, Poison and probably something else embarrassing that I’m forgetting. Oh, well)

And then I remembered that I went to the concert with a guy named Sam. I remember crashing at his house that night after the concert, and seeing Welcome to the Jungle and thinking that just perhaps this band was actually evil. How terribly young and naive I was–I didn’t realize that the only person in hard rock who might have been as evil as he sounded was Bon Scott.

I have no way to find out his last name, at least not easily. I didn’t get a yearbook, as I was only in the school for one year, and never expected to see any of these people again, really. In fact, I didn’t get a yearbook for any year I was in High School. I wanted nothing more than to get that period of my life behind me.

But I did buy a mug. It had the names, admittedly in fairly small print, of the 80-ish people I graduated with. So I might have looked through the list (assuming Sam graduated–I’m not 100% certain that he did) and found a name and looked him up on Facebook, so on and so forth. Stranger things have happened.

But alas, that was not to be. That mug took a dive in…hmmm, I’m gonna have to guess here and say ’91. I do know that it got taken out by Chet‘s girlfriend at the time, Cassie. I remember this because Cassie–who was a very nice person–was very contrite and got me another mug to replace it, a handmade one from somewhere near where her parents lived, though I don’t actually remember where that was.

And that was the mug I drank out of for a number of years.

Until it, too, bit the dust. Probably in Miami, maybe some time around ’98, though it is possible it made it with us to North Carolina before meeting an untimely end. I’m fairly certain that it didn’t see this millennium, though I don’t remember for sure.

This time it was Anne who done the deed. But she, too, was quite contrite, and got me a mug that I still have today. Dark, dark blue, heavy and big—the defining quality of all three mugs being that they were quite large.

I’m a big believer in not getting attached to things–they get broken, they get lost, you give them away to the people who can use them better, you dispose of them to make more room, whatever; usually feel better after the occasional purge. It’s always just stuff–I don’t want to be the narrator in Fight Club, thinking I’ve got it solved because I’ve finally got that coffee table and couch issue squared away.

At the same time, though, I believe fiercely in working to remember where they came from, and how they’re bind you not by their thing-ness, but by the story of how they came to you, and the people who gave them to you, and everything else they might have given you. I hadn’t thought about Cassie in probably a decade, since Chet told me of running into her once by accident. I hadn’t thought about Sam in probably 20 years. I hadn’t thought about the mugs, and how they came into my life.

On the one hand, my experience of this is fairly profound. But from the outside, and even to an extent from the inside, this is terribly, spectacularly mundane stuff.

Thank God they at least got rid of the commas

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Someone created a bestiary of List Code Typography and my immediate gut reaction upon seeing the earliest possible examples was that the only thing that could ever have been more confusing than all the parenthesis in the world was if you had to put commas in-between every goddamned thing.

The language I’m currently learning, Haskell, has its roots in the Lambda Calculus as well, but goes entirely in the other direction–no punctuation at all.

On becoming more mainstream…

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I’m realizing that 17 years ago turns out to be a pretty pivotal time for me professionally. In addition to being the time period when I found what has been my primary programming language ever since, it is the time when I threw caution to the wind and embraced Linux as my primary desktop OS.

As out-of-the-mainstream as that decision has been–and it was far more radical back in the ’90s before KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu and what-have-you–I have often constructed my desktop out of components that were considered outre even by Linux standards. I ran FVWM 2.X when people were still thinking that 1.x was the way to go. I ran IceWM when a lot of people were embracing Enlightenment or one of the NeXT-step based WMs. Even when I was using components of Gnome on a daily basis, and even trying it out from time to time, I never committed to it, figuring out how to use those components from within whatever unusual setup I was using.

For the last three years or so, I’ve been using the Awesome WM to construct my thoroughly idiosyncratic but highly-efficient desktop environment.

No more.

I’ve always run something more mainstream on my desktop machine, because Anne uses it occasionally to work with GnuCash. Which meant that I was also using it fairly regularly, since I try to keep up with our finances on a daily basis. And six weeks or so ago, I decided to “upgrade” it to Gnome 3. I knew that if it didn’t work out–and I didn’t really expect it to, Gnome 3 having been pretty thoroughly reviled when released–I could always fall back to Xfce, which is what it had been running.

Much to my surprise, I found I kinda liked Gnome 3. It got rid of a lot of the clutter that had annoyed me about most Gnome 2 setups. In fact, except for the fact that individual windows had titlebars, the default presentation was almost as minimalist as my Awesome setup. And I found having the ability to hit the Mod4 (AKA Windows) key and then just start typing to start an application, well, that was actually more convenient than the Mod4+F1 that I was doing with Awesome. And so forth. Basically, it seemed like with a little tweaking, I might be able to be happy and productive.

So late last week, I installed all the Gnome 3 stuff on my laptop, and started tweaking. And yesterday, I uninstalled Awesome and the things I had been using with it.

Now I’m not embracing every aspect of Gnome life. There’s no way I’m going to try and manage my email in Evolution, whose interface I find awkward and slow. And I’m not likely to trade Chromium for Epiphany just yet–not until it’s got equivalent JS speed, at least. And I installed a few gnome-shell extensions, and intend to install a few more. And I totally remapped the window manager keys.

But right now, I am working more within the Linux mainstream than I have, well, perhaps ever.

Choosing a new language

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I have been programming primarily–for long stretches, almost exclusively–in Perl for the last 17 years or so. I seem to remember starting to use it around mid-1995, with 5.001–during that long, awkward time between when Perl 5 came out and when the 2nd edition of Programming Perl finally arrived in late 1996.

I’ve kept with it because I’m fluent in it, I am productive in it, and at this point, I can make it do some fairly absurd things (ask me about writing event-driven servers in Perl, I dare you). In fact, I like the language. I understand the complaints people have about it, but the subset in which I write these days is pretty clear while remaining concise and expressive, and the ecosystem that exists around it is simply unparalleled.

Nonetheless, I think the time has come to move on. The downsides of the language–speed, largely, and lack of good language support for expressing things like parallelism–have started to wear at me. I’m tired of the hoops I have to jump through to do the things I want to do.

So for the last 18 months or so, I’ve been reading a lot about a number of languages. I don’t think I’ve rejected any out of hand except PHP, though I certainly have some biases. For instance, I am looking for a mainstream language–something like IO, though interesting, does not qualify.

But mainstream isn’t everything–I want something that is going to open up new options, that’s going to be fun to get immersed in; so I’m not considering things like Ruby or Python because for the most part I think they recapitulate most of the problems I have with Perl (speed, concurrency support) just with different syntax.

In the end, I came down to three options. Node.js, Scala and Haskell. I find that as I’ve been sitting with the question for the last couple of weeks, though, I’ve stopped thinking about Node.js as a real option. Though it’s fast, and it’s got a great ecosystem of software surrounding it, raw event-driven programming doesn’t really engage me any more. It was fun for the first year or two I did it, but the idea of moving to an environment where Everything Is A Callback leaves me cold.

So it’s down to Scala and Haskell, I think.

As a consequence, I’ve spent the last week reading Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide, 2nd Edition by Odersky, Spoon and Venners, and before that I got most of the way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good by Miran Lipovaca (though I’m going to go back through it now and finish it).

I intend, over the next couple of weeks, to post about my experiences working on using each to write a couple of short (but non-trivial) programs with both of them–ones that, incidentally, I have implemented in Perl already, so I can do a real comparison of code.

Jeff Beck, Live at Ronnie Scott’s

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I’ve just TiVO’d and watched this for a second time in about nine months.

I have to admit to knowing a fair bit about Jeff Beck, while knowing almost none of his music.

The performance here convinced me to pick up some of his best-known albums…which mostly disappointed. I guess part of my mistake was getting some of the “Jeff Beck Group” albums, because while those are certainly well known, I wasn’t particularly interested in his work with Rod Stewart. But even with the solo instrumental work, it seemed sometimes a little sterile.

But in the live context, I was blown away by his tastefulness, his craft, his absurd command of dynamics. For instance, not only is his solo on this track admirably restrained, but his backing during the the verse is amazingly rich.

And he had Vinnie Colaiuta of “Catholic Girls” fame playing drums for him. And Tal Wilkenfeld is both adorable, and able to keep right up with him.

Anne’s Carrot Cake

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This started life as the carrot cake recipe from The America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, Revised Edition. And then Anne tweaked it. Heavily.

Carrot cake

Ingredients

  • 2 1⁄~2~ cups spelt flour (all-purpose flour is acceptable)
  • 1 1⁄~4~ teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 1⁄~4~ teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1⁄~2~ teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
  • 1⁄~8~ teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1⁄~2~ teaspoon salt
  • 4 extra large eggs
  • 1 1⁄~4~ cups light brown sugar
  • 3⁄~4~ cup granulated sugar
  • 1 1⁄~2~ cups coconut oil (melted)
  • 1 1⁄~2~ cups walnuts, toasted and chopped
  • 1 cup raisins
  • 2 pounds carrots, washed and grated (use a food processor, seriously)

Recipe

  1. Make sure the oven rack is in the middle position and preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
  2. Lightly coat a 9×13 cake pan with butter then line the bottom with parchment paper.
  3. Whisk the flour, baking powder, baking soda, spices and salt together in a large bowl and set aside.
  4. Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a very large bowl until frothy and the sugar is dissolved, 1 to 2 minutes with an electric hand mixer.
  5. Continue whisking the eggs and sugar as you add the oil, until the mixture is completely emulsified, about a minute.
  6. Gently whisk the flour mixture in until there are no streaks left.
  7. Stir in the carrots, walnuts and raisins. This will be an upper body workout.
  8. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
  9. Bake until a wooden skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean, assume a minimum of 50 minutes. Rotate the pan halfway through baking.
  10. Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack, about 2 hours.
  11. Run a paring knife around the perimeter of the pan, invert the fake onto the rack, peel off the parchment paper, then invert the cake again onto a serving platter.

Icing

Ingredients

  • 8 oz cream cheese, softened
  • 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
  • 1 tablespoon plain yogurt
  • 1⁄~2~ teaspoon vanilla extract (you can be liberal here)
  • 1 1⁄~4~ cups confectioner’s sugar

Recipe

  1. Blend the cream cheese, butter, yogurt and vanilla until combined, 5 to 10 seconds.
  2. Add the confectioner’s sugar and continue to blend on low until smooth, scraping the bowl as needed, 15 to 30 seconds.
  3. Spread icing on cooled cake.

Treat your cast-iron right…

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and it will be kind to you.

Sheryl Canter has a very specific technique for seasoning cast iron cookware that is supposed to produce amazing results. Like all the best techniques, it’s grounded in science rather than hearsay.

But don’t take her word for it–Americas Test Kitchen tried her technique, and found that after treating a cast-iron skillet based on her technique, you could send it through a commercial wash cycle–with degreasing agent–and the finish was undamaged.

Our three cast iron skillets–one of which belonged to my great grandmother–are used so consistently they live on top of the stove; we basically never put them away. We use our stainless steel pots for soups, basically, but cast iron for everything else. This does present me with the small problem of taking them out of circulation to season them well.

Mind you, I have my eye on a Le Creuset Dutch Oven some day. Enameled, but still cast iron.

Stanley Fish’s Life Report

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I understand Stanley Fish is a controversial character. I don’t rightly know why–I gather something about academic politics and maybe being on the wrong side of people who like to call other people fascists or something–and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t concern me.

What I do know is that I find this essay he wrote about the things, in retrospect, he wishes he had placed more importance upon during his life to be compelling stuff.

Kim Kardashian

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Oh, pop culture, why would I care?

In fact, I don’t–other people’s marriages are of interest to me only to the extent that some people are unfairly excluded from it on the basis of their sexual orientation–but this does seem an opportune moment to make an observation.

Kim Kardashian’s mockery of a marriage seems to me less about the failure of morals in a liberal society–a subject upon which I would not be surprised to hear many pundits bloviate in the coming days—and more about the allure of money and the type of action to which its pursuit often leads. Kim Kardashian was simply doing what was necessary to make sure she was one of the 1%. It seems worthwhile to consider whether others, too, might have fallen into immoral behavior in its pursuit.

Thor

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…was never one of my favorite characters. Still, I had read some favorable comments about the movie, and Hell, it was directed by Henry VKenneth Branagh, so it should be OK, right?

I think Kat Dennings was probably my favorite part of the movie, really–cute, sassy and way more interesting than either Jane Foster or muscle-boy.

Yeah, that’s right, the two-dimensional sidekick was way more interesting than the main characters, who managed roughly 1.5 dimensions.

Hell, The Destroyer–which had no lines and did nothing other than blow things up (though it did that magnificently)–was more interesting than our ostensible focus.

Oh, well. I guess I’ll watch–and, I suspect, dis–Captain American next.

Children of the Sky and Snuff

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Two of my favorite SF novels are A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge. So when I heard several months ago that there was a sequel to the first being released this month, I felt both excitement and deep trepidation.

My experience of the book, Children of the Sky, falls somewhere in the middle.

In a way, I guess you could say the scope of all three books has been narrowing–A Fire Upon the Deep being a no-holds-barred Space Opera, A Deepness in the Sky being a first-contact novel, while Children of the Sky is a political thriller that happens to have aliens. It does a good job at what it is, but I found myself missing the sense of wonder that the first two books provoke in me even after numerous readings.

I enjoyed it enough that it’s not going to go into the pile to be donated to the library–and these days I’m getting pretty darn ruthless about putting stuff in that pile–but I suspect that if I went out and bought a new copy of A Fire Upon the Deep (which I kinda need–the old one’s getting pretty worn), in 10 years, it will probably show more evidence of use.

Before that, though, I read Snuff, Terry Pratchett’s latest.

I am sad to say that this is the first Discworld novel in the last 15 years that I haven’t wanted to re-read almost immediately. Like Children of the Sky, I don’t intend to get rid of it, but I feel like it’s relying overmuch on my love of the characters to make up for a plot that seems a little lacking in originality–it feels a little like the bastard child of The Fifth Elephant, Thud! and Unseen Academicals, and I think the result is a little tepid.

In my heart of hearts, though, I know some of my dissatisfaction stems from the fact that I realize that this book or the next book or the one after that is likely to be his last, and I want one last Granny Weatherwax novel. For me, she and Sam Vimes are the emotional core of his cast of characters–both people who are so desperately suspicious of themselves that being good often seems to make them angry–but she hasn’t been center-stage since Carpe Jugulum in ’98, and I have that childish desire to see her again.

My Chai recipe

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I knew that I had posted “my” chai recipe at some point in the past, but when I found it, I discovered that it was an old version. Time to update it, especially since as I’ve been getting more and more requests for the recipe of late. Something about cold weather.

The single biggest difference between the version I posted before and this one is that I’ve been using rooibos (aka redbush) tea for the last several years. This started because I was making it for a bunch of yoga practitioners, some of whom had sworn off caffeine. The unexpected benefit was that 1) rooibos is very tasty, and 2) unlike black tea, rooibos doesn’t get bitter if you steep it more than a couple of minutes. This means it’s possible to steep it for a long time and make a strong tea that stands up well to milk or milk-analogues.

Also, you can have it in the evening and still expect to get to sleep.

Since I sometimes make huge batches for 20 or 30 people over a weekend, but mostly batches to last Anne and I a week, this recipe is more concerned with proportion than amount (hence quantities below denoted as 4x or 2x, rather than 4T or whatever). Starting out, if you’re working with a gallon of water, x = 1 heaping tablespoon. If you’re working with a quart of water, x = 1 heaping teaspoon. Over time you’ll probably discover that you prefer certain things to be a little stronger and others to be a little weaker. I rarely even measure anymore, I just eyeball it. So don’t worry about it too much.

Ingredients

4x loose rooibos tea
4x peeled and sliced ginger
3x whole cardamom, crushed
3x cinnamon, crushed
2x whole cloves
2x black peppercorns, crushed
1x star anise, crushed
vanilla bean

For the vanilla bean I use about half a bean for a gallon of chai.

Preparation

Bring all ingredients to a boil in a pot appropriate to the amount of water you’re using. Put a top on it, and turn down low enough that it’s just simmering, and let simmer for 30 minutes. Turn off heat, and if possible, leave it to steep overnight with the cover on. Filter and store.

I generally use this in equal proportion with milk, frothing it with the steam wand on my espresso machine—the frothiness is a nice complement. It works just as well if you whisk it in a pot as you heat it up, it’s just more work. I’ve drunk it with cow’s milk, almond milk and soy milk, all of which go well with it.

As always, slacktivist has a way with a turn of phrase…

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This is the sort of inhuman behavior that clarifies that, regardless of what five Supreme Court justices may say, corporations are not people. They have no soul to save, no body to incarcerate, no heart to break and no ass to kick.

Also includes graph as to why the 99% might be justified in being a little peeved.

10 years gone

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Ars Technica has a retrospective about Windows XP’s long life that I found very interesting.

Until reading it, I couldn’t have told you when XP was released. I was out of the Windows biz by then—all of my personal work machines had been running Linux for two or three years by that point, and I had given up all but the most peripheral contact with Windows when I left the University of Miami in ’99.

Still, I did have some dealings with it. We eventually replaced Anne’s Gateway laptop running Windows 95 with a ThinkPad T40 running XP in 2003 or so. Even though it’s some 8 years old we still have it, and it still has XP on it. For the longest time I used it to play World of Warcraft on XP, though it’s been a couple of years since I’ve done that—at this point I just need to wipe it and dispose of it. But it still runs.

And thinking about it, I have to say, XP was pretty darned stable, and something resembling svelte. Whenever I have to use Anne’s current Windows 7 machines, I’m always amazed at how slow such powerful machines can be made to run. XP even on much older hardware is surprisingly snappy.

In retrospect, though I would never have wanted to use it as my primary OS or anything, I have to admit that XP was actually a pretty good OS.

The Hunger Games

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Yeah, so I started it on my fathers Nook while we were visiting with them in Panama City, FL, early last month. When we got home, I put it on my list of things to get at the library, and then prepared to wait.

However, the Sunday morning yoga class I teach has also taken on something of a book-club character—really, I guess you could say it’s taken on a circle-of-friends character, as we often end up talking about one thing or another, books and food are just persistent topics.

Anyway, someone offered to loan me the first book, but I was in the middle of a stack of things that were coming in from the library, so it sat for a few weeks, and then I got the new Terry Pratchett novel for my birthday, so that got precedence.

Last night I made the mistake of picking it up just before bed, and didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours. And then picked it up over coffee and oatmeal, and was late getting to my desk. And then finished it over lunch.

I guess in some ways it reminds me of Ender’s Game, which isn’t an entirely positive association for me. It’s compulsively readable, that’s for sure. And I’ll probably borrow the other two from my source…but they’re certainly not books I see myself ever wanting to actually own.

Stations of the Tide

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I have a hard time even describing this book. I guess it reminds me most of something Gene Wolfe might write. You come to distrust the narrative, feeling it’s leading you astray even as it tells you the truth.

I don’t know that I would recommend it, and I don’t know that I would re-read it, but it was worthwhile to have read the once.

BSG S1:E3 – “Water”

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What do you do when you don’t remember what you’ve done?

There are real incidences of people committing murder while in a somnambulistic state. Can you imagine what that would be like, to wake up and find that you’d done something you had no memory of, that you would never have chosen to to? Even in the world of BSG, your first thought would not, could not be, “I must be a Cylon.” To doubt your own identity at that level seems unthinkable. In a way, I think Boomer (and the Chief) don’t go quite crazy enough.

I didn’t like the bits when Boomer was on the water patrol. It wasn’t clear to me what the mechanism in operation—seeing the somnambulism was less convincing than seeing the aftermath as at the beginning. The whole business with the explosives on the Raptor was confusing, though with it there, I would have expected her, like Galen, to realize that this was evidence that perhaps she wasn’t responsible.

It’s interesting to see that at this point it was still easy to think Tricia Helfer was just eye-candy, spouting out weird lines about God. I don’t remember it being until later, maybe “New Caprica” or thereabouts that she really started to show that there was depth there.

The interplay between Laura and Adama is adorable, even knowing its ultimate melancholy outcome, and the rockiness that lies ahead.

The tension between Baltar and Starbuck was great. I don’t remember offhand whether they ever actually sleep together, but that was certainly a great setup for the idea.

BSG S1:E3 – “33″

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Way to ratchet up the tension.

If the second half of the mini-series seemed like a little bit of a let-down (and I’ve not yet got my commentary on it up, so this is a spoiler), this first episode of the actual series kicks things right back into high gear.

Even if I find it implausible that the Colonials are able to even pretend to function after 130+ hours, medicated or not, the actors do their considerable best to give the impression that these are people who are beyond even working on autopilot. Even the best of them have moments of staring off into nothingness as their minds are unable to keep going.

Oh, the characters. The writers seemed to understand them well, and figured out ways to show who they are without hitting us in the face with it. Kara’s confrontation with Lee that looks like it’s truly going to spill over into violence until they both burst out laughing. The look on Laura’s face when at they end, she gets the news that a baby’s been born. Adama’s sadness and forgiveness when Dualla admits she doesn’t know if a ship checked in before they made their jump.

Tigh…I wonder if they were already planning to make Tigh one of the “Final Five”, because he (as with Boomer, who we already know is a Cylon) is shown here as having extraordinary endurance. He actually seems to enjoy it.

Finally, I had forgotten how weird things were with Baltar and Six right from the get-go. This episode seems to be setting up the idea that the Cylon’s god is very involved and present–and yet, it could all be coincidental.

The truth isn’t always what you want it to be.

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So, there’s this video going around of Al Franken (whom I truly admire as one of our more sensible-seeming Senators1) taking Tim Minnery–who services in some sort of capacity with the anti-gay Focus on the Family organization–to task for misrepresenting a study about the correlation of the well-being of children and the type of family they come from.

Now I support same-sex marriage, and love to see bigots of all stripes get schooled, but I’m not sure Franken is necessarily right on this one.

Specifically, if the study defines a “nuclear family” as a married couple—and you can hear Senator Franken use the phrase “who are married to one another” at 1:59, when he says he is reading the definition the study uses—then Minnery’s interpretation is at least legitimate, and perhaps even more correct: because same-sex couples are not allowed to marry in all but a scant handful of states, they are going to be excluded from the “nuclear family” category in almost all cases.

There may be more to it that’s not in this clip, but in this case, I’m not sure the evidence as portrayed holds up to scrutiny.

1 Many years ago, Anne and I were seated at a table adjacent to his in a restaurant in Harvard Square.

Getting a good copy of the org-mode refcard on two-sided Letter paper

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Dear lazyweb,

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my printer, but here’s what I had to do to get a good print of the org-mode refcard onto Letter paper. From within the org-mode sources, I did:

make doc/orgcard_letter.tex
cd doc
tex orgcard_letter.tex
dvips -O "-.5in,.25in" -t letter -t landscape orgcard_letter.dvi

This got me a .ps file that seemed well-centered on the page. To print it, I did:

ps2pdf14 orgcard_letter.ps
evince orgcard_letter.pdf (print, duplex flipped on the short side)

I probably could have done (using lp directly, but since I was also using evince to eyeball the layout first, it was easiest to do it from there):

lp -o sides=two-sided-short-edge orgcard_letter.ps

Continued hilarity in Transformers reviews…

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This one from Tor.com:

On it’s 3D-ness:

Weirdly, because it’s exactly the same as a normal Michael Bay movie, the 3D camerawork seems almost understated, because there’s none of the usual “wooooooo, look at the threeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-deeeeeeeeee” foolishness. It actually makes his visual compositions a little more legible; being able to see what’s going on in a Michael Bay action scene is a novel experience, even if what you’re seeing confirms your prior thesis that what’s going on is giant robots beating the crap out of each other.

And the coup de grace:

This should not be confused with my thinking Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a good movie. It’s absolutely, categorically not. Calling it a movie is giving it too much benefit of the doubt. Michael Bay is engaged in a parallel medium, using all the equipment other people use to make movies, but creating something that bears only cursory resemblance to actual cinema. It’s a mechanism for stealing the brain’s car keys, forcibly duct-taping the pleasure center’s accelerator pedal to the floor, and sending the whole nervous system flying toward a cliff. While on fire. It’s very possible to enjoy oneself in such a state, but it’s equally possible to feel assaulted.

The funny thing is that I actually now, through a total accident of, “What, that’s an open-box you have that’s an upgrade from the TV I wanted?” own a 3-D TV. Not that I have any intention of actually using this feature, but it’s there.

BSG S1:E1

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This is some insanely taut storytelling, and while it tries to be clear what is happening at any moment–it’s only about the jump cuts during space battles, which is probably an appropriate place to do that–it’s happy to wait until later to reveal to you the implications of what you saw. Which I regard as a good thing–not assuming your audience is stupid is still refreshing.

As an example, we see Six on the space station, seemingly destroyed, and then we’re shown the same person with Baltar, and although we get that this is a signal that she is probably not one of the good guys (not to mention the incident with the baby–which I still can’t decide whether to interpret as mercy or as the equivalent of pulling the legs off a spider1 just to see what happens), they’re happy to wait half an hour to let us know that they can upload their consciousness–and we’re still not told whether the one on Caprica is the same one as on the space station.

Even the bits that could easily have seemed like off-the-shelf parts–I’m thinking of the exchange between Apollo and Commander Adama after their photo-shoot, where the rift between them starts to become clear–still resonate because the writers hold back You understand that Lee holds his father responsible, and you think you understand what happened, but still much is left unsaid–we’re not given any sort of infodump, even though they still didn’t know if they were going to get anything more than a miniseries at this point.

And, the actors are just so damned good. The moment near the end of the first half, where Lee explains to President Roslin that “Apollo” is just his call-sign–Mary McDonnell gives him this fleeting smile before telling him she knows who he is, it’s just amazing. The entirety of Gaius Baltar’s performance is so wonderfully…slimy. And the moment when Tigh decides to sacrifice people to put out fires is chilling…the way he hesitates, but finally acts without remorse.

Interestingly, knowing in advance how it’s all going to come out, Adama’s speech at the decommissioning ceremony for the Galactica seems to point to everything that the series ends up being concerned with–the responsibility of a creator toward his creations. They take a circuitous route, and I’ll be curious how well Ronald D. Moore actually holds to it over the long term, but it might actually be that they set out their ideas here, first thing.

1 I have never done this, if only because I find spiders way too creepy to want to be that intimate with. But the replicants systematic destruction of a spider toward the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep has always haunted me.