The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

I wasn’t actually a reader of “TMFTML”:http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/, but when I noticed a reference to it, I went to see if it had re-opened because Chet had been a fan.

Mostly, I just want to echo “the assessment”:http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/archives/001851.html#001851 of Modest Mouse’s latest album, ??Good News for People Who Like Bad News??, which was an album I listened to quite a lot during my stint in DC.

I can’t express my feelings towards Modest Mouse. They are an untelegenic band, the lead singer is rather older and not nearly as scrawny as I had imagined. His voice isn’t that great–it’s better than mine, but that says fuck-all–and he mutters indistinctly, and the guitars twang in odd ways, but Lord, the lyrics make me feel 19 again when the lyrics to songs meant everything in the world.

When the idea of Bob Dylan in Victoria’s Secret commercials never would have even occured to rational people.

This is the first album I’ve heard in years that has well and truly taken the top of my head off and set it back down askew.

bq. Woke up this morning
And it seemed to me
That every night turns out to be
A little more like Bukowski
And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read.
But God who’s wanna be?
God who’d wanna be such an asshole?

Were-hippos

“Heh”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2005_01_23_fafblog_archive.html#110669057794140997.

I’m not sure that there is any response to the state of the world that is more sane than “Fafblog!”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/

The new lead paint?

So, “Slashdot has an article about paint that will help you protect your wireless network”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05%2F01%2F14%2F0028208. By lacing the paint with copper and aluminum fibers, they’re hoping to create a simple “Faraday Cage”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage (hey, that’s my first-ever link to wikipedia!), thereby reducing or eliminating the amount of RF passing through your walls.

Hope you don’t watch broadcast television.

But, much more worryingly, am I the only one who remembers the decades of issues we’ve had in this country with lead paint–lead having been a great pigment for getting a nice bright white color–and small children eating the paint when it chipped off, and the neurological problems that that engendered, and at the same time remembering that copper can be poisonous, and aluminum may be connected with Alzheimer’s (though Wikipedia’s article on Aluminum suggests that that’s been refuted)?

I have heard it suggested that Rome may have systematically poisoned itself into irrelevance when they lined the aqueducts with lead. Are we considering doing a similar job?

What strange things you can be lead to on the web

So I idly look on Amazon to see if there’s a release date for the new Nine Inch Nails album ??With Teeth??. No, but there _is_ “an album by the same name by another band”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00001MXV6/qid%3D1105376386/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/102-8228765-4982512, so I wonder if I got the name wrong, so I go to nin.com, and look at the “pseudo-blog section”:http://nin.com/current/index.html, which contains a comment about “Dimebag Darrell”:http://www.damageplan.com/ and someone named “Jhonn”. So hit google, and end up being pointed to (among other places) “blogofdeath.com”:http://blogofdeath.com/, which turns out to be much more serious than its name might imply.

Adventures in wine country

The morning started off early–no appreciable acclamatization to the time change had taken place.

After a nice breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel, “Anzu”:http://www.restaurantanzu.com/, I went across the street to National Car Rental, got a car, and headed north.

I must say, the drive is fast when you’re going opposite prevailing traffic–I was in Sonoma in roughly an hour, and took the time to stop in “a little net cafe there”:http://adobenetcafe.com/ to download some email and post yesterday’s entry.

I then headed to “Ravenswood”:http://ravenswoodwinery.com/rwd/index.jsp, where I tasted quite a bit of wine, and then, to let my blood-alcohol level get back into a normal range, chatted with the people behind the counter for the better part of an hour and then arranged to have a mixed case of wine shipped back to North Carolina.

The most unexpected wine would have to be a Moscato that you could probably sub in for any non-dry Reisling–it’s sweet, but not cloyingly so. They also had a nice early-harvest Gewurztraminner that _is_ quite dry.

An unfortunate casualty of recent expansions in the wine business is that they are no longer able to get enough grapes to bottle their Amador County Zinfandel, which I rather like. Oh, well.

Interestingly, they were aquired in the none-too-distant past by Constellation, which is the same company that just paid more than a billion-with-a-b dollars for the Mondavi brands.

Already well behind schedule–and I’d only hit one winery!–I decided to skip Arrowood (who had not had anything compelling last time Anne and I were there) and head directly to “Wellington Vineyards”:http://www.wellingtonvineyards.com/. The person behind the counter there was not as garrulous as the crew at Ravenswood, but we did have a nice chat, and I picked up two bottles of their Criolla Port–a tawny, a previous bottling of which was the first thing that attracted us to them–and their Mohrhardt Ridge and Sonoma Valley Cabernet Sauvignons each. The Mohrhardt Ridge, especially, is a wonderful wine.

Having gotten out of there more quickly than I expected to, I then headed further north than we usually make it, to “Alexander Valley Vineyards”:http://www.avvwine.com/. I had a nice chat with the guy behind the bar, and tried several things. Their New Gewurz is nice, but not as good as the Ravenswood–I’ve also seen the label before, so I figured we could pick it up locally if we wanted some. Their 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon is an award winner, and I picked up a couple of bottles of that. Their Sangiovese is a nice, light, very drinkable red, of which I got a bottle. What really impressed me, though, was their 2002 Pinot Noir, which I thought very interesting and very smooth.

I was apparently interesting and talkative enough that I also got to have a taste of their 1998 Cyrus–a mostly-Cabernet that is very, very nice. If we hadn’t been going to a vegeterian restaurant, and I hadn’t been sure how it would have stood up to a Cabernet, I might have bought a bottle to drink that night. As it was, though, I just savored my sample.

From there, I headed south through Santa Rosa and Napa. I stopped at Dean and Deluca for a very late lunch and to get some chocolates for Anne in an attempt to atone for the fact that I’d already bought two cases of wine and I had one more stop.

I also called Chet, to inquire as to whether he would be terribly disappointed if I wasn’t able to get him the bottle of the “Domaine Carneros”:http://www.domaine.com/ La Rev that I intended to get for him and Erin into his hands before the actual wedding. He allowed as how that was OK, and if I picked him up a couple of bottles of their reserve Pinot Noir, they might arrange to come and pick them up before October.

Carneros is always beautiful, and in addition to tasting their Pinot, I got to sample their 1998 La Rev, which is, to my taste, everything a Champaigne should be.

And then I headed back to the city, to drop the car off before the 6pm deadline. I did so, but I failed the IQ test that is opening the door over the gas cap–it turned out to be simple, but non-obvious–so we got reamed a bit on the refill.

After catching up with Anne’s undergraduate roomate, who’s here for her job at Yale Law, we went with UNC’s Associate Dean to “Millennium”:http://www.thesavoyhotel.com/millennium.html, the only vegetarian restaurant I believe I’ve ever been to. Forget your preconcieved notions, it’s really good. Sometimes it’s hard to anticipate what the dish is going to be like, but they were all quite good.

And then we went back to the hotel and collaped.

Flying

So, we headed out to Cali yesterday morning. Our flight to Newark was uneventful, as was our flight to SFO, although we sat next to a painter and her cat–her husband and her other cat (in a bizarre coincidence, a male named Tucker) were across the aisle.

Her website “has some interesting material”:http://madelonjones.com/. She was very interesting to talk to.

We also saw ??The Bourne Supremacy?? and ??Vanity Fair??. ??The Bourne Supremacy?? seemed a perfectly reasonable film of its type–a reasonable way to pass an hour and a half. ??Vanity Fair?? actually left me interesting in reading the book for I wonder how the book itself treats Becky Sharp.

The movie seems to portray her as someone who starts off as a good, if driven, woman who gradually loses her way in the fairly amoral environment she ascends to–her desire to climb socially doesn’t seem as calculating as it might have been, and she shows a lot of compassion to a lot of people during the process, perhaps more than she might be expected to.

Anyway, we landed, got to Hotel Nikko, discovered that we didn’t have reservations–apparently a fuckup on the part of the conference organizers–but we were able to talk our way in anyway. We took a swim, then went for a fairly early dinner at the Tadich Grill.

While it’s probably not a tourist trap _per se_, it’s probably got a lot of tourists going to it. We might not have gone except for Anne’s mother who seemed to want to experience it vicariously.

The food was good, although it’s a very no-nonsense environment. I had a petrala sole, charcoal grilled, that was quite nice with nothing more than lemon. As a side dish, the spinach with garlic is highly recommended. And we got to see set of twins who are “apparently some sort of local institution”:http://www.pbase.com/image/274414.

Then we went back to the hotel and slept. Now I’m sitting in a cafe in Sonoma, it’s just hit 10am, and I’m about to go hit a bunch of wineries.

An unexpected development.

OK, I reported before, with some trepidation, about “plans to make a move of ??V for Vendetta??”:/2004/11/i-cant-decide-if-this-is-good-or-bad.html.

It has become more interesting in that “Natalie Portman may feature in it”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?category=0&id=30098.

She’s an interesting actress–her willingness to get involved in the massive charlie-foxtrot of schlock that is the Star Wars prequel trilogy aside.

I dunno.

I had one of those back-in-college dreams…

…but this one was different. I was taking a course in writing Humorous Essays, but most class discussion consisted, perhaps unsuprisingly, of one-liners. I was concerned that my work was too bitterly ironic; I wanted it to be a little more generously funny. And Tina Fey was in the class. And she had a habit of standing uncomfortably close to me.

There was more, but I couldn’t remember it by the time I actually got up.

Watch the computer thinking

“!http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg!”:http://turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/ending-viz-small.jpg

A shot from “a computer chess applet that shows a graphical representation of it’s analysis”:http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/java/?permalink=ThinkingMachine4.txt.

“Via Nick Lothian”:http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/

Secondhand Lions

!http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/1400/5h/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/7200000/7202079.jpg! Although there is definitely a soft white underbelly of overblown sentiment in this movie, there’s also a good chunk of Michael Caine and Robert Duvall appearing to be having–and if you credit Caine’s appearance on The Daily Show, having–a lot of fun, along with pretty decent work by Haley Joe Osment, who gives every sign of growing into a credible actor.

I was surprised to find, browsing on “IMDb”:http://imdb.com/ that one of his first film rolls was as Forrest Gump Jr. Oh, well, there’s no accounting for coincidence.

Even weirder is to find that the director is planning to write and direct a film of Piers Anthony’s ??A Spell for Chameleon??, which I think is just too strange to transfer well to film.

Happy New Year

I hope everyone reading is well–all two or three of you.

We had a day of beautiful weather–it was more like January in Miami than January in Durham. Of course, I spent too much of it inside playing World of Warcraft, but Anne and I still got a walk of a bit over an hour and a quarter in midafternoon.

On an amusing meta-note, I can only guess that the person who found this site by searching for “milla jovovich naked” did not get what he (presumably) was looking for, since it probably wasn’t snarky comments about ??Resident Evil??.

I’m vaguely amazed that I have enough google juice that I would show up in such a search.

Oh, and if you haven’t read ??Moneyball??, do. I don’t care if you don’t like baseball, you should still read it. I might do a more detailed review later, but for the moment, I’ll just say that JD and Cory (my sister and brother-in-law–I’m guessing the nephews, Calvin and Nigel had no direct input) got it for me for Christmas, and, well, it didn’t make it through Boxing Day. Generally nonfiction takes me longer than that.

Anyway, get some sleep. I’m going to.

So what does “Christmas Spirit” really mean?

The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek but the fact is I’m starting to think that for me the answer is “mild depression”.

Now I’m really not trying to cause anyone concern–this is not “I’m going to go jump off a bridge now” material. I don’t feel unhappy or anything–which even now makes me wonder if I’m wrong–instead, I’m just totally and utterly apathetic. I have no energy, no desire to do anything active at all–I’d happily sleep, eat and watch television, maybe read and play World of Warcraft.

In fact, at first I just thought it was that I was tired–three months in DC did take a lot out of me; it was stressful for a whole host of reasons, and it didn’t exactly end on a high note. But I’ve had plenty of time to get past the physiological effects, and yet here I find myself, feeling like Inertia Man–if I can get moving, I can sometimes find some energy and keep it going, but most of the time, I lose steam quickly. And it happens pretty much every year.

Oh, well, as reliably as it comes, it goes, too. In a couple of weeks I’ll wake up bursting with energy, wondering why I was so egregiously slack for the last month–it’s just weird to realize all this.

Hawking Technology makes some interesting router hardware…

…but I’m not sure I’d go to them for web development.

It is a tiresome fact of web development that you can’t trust anything the user enters, and you really _must_ validate input you get from your users. Unfortunately, the “message you get from following this link”:http://www.hawkingtech.com/prodSpec.php?ProdID= (which I didn’t construct–it was on their site) seems to show that they’re not doing a very good job of that.

(Not that I’ve ever been perfect, either, but I try hard.)

I don’t have anything insightful to add…

…but I will note that during the three months I was in Washington, the two local, non-political things that dominated the news were the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Dupont Circle and the jubilation of some that they would no longer have to drive to Baltimore to see pro baseball.

Nevertheless, I don’t see how paying for a new stadium for a team would be anything other than a boondoggle.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder…

“I hope your children turn out to be as perfect as you are, sir.”

— Bill Clinton, quoted by the “New York Daily News”:http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/262079p-224420c.html, allegedly to a man “pushing a stroller” in Central Park who called him “an embarrassment.”

It’s all Chet’s fault…

…that postings have dried up, insofar as he hectored me into buying Worlds of Warcraft, which is interfering with me getting any, you know, _work_ done.

I haven’t spent this much time with a video game since ’95 or ’96, when Quake came out.

Josh Marshall pretty much sums it up

“Read it here.”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_12_05.php#004169

Discussing the Bush Administration’s plan to privatize Social Security:

bq. In other words, we have to start phasing out Social Security now because if we don’t we’re going to face some big borrowing in a few decades. But we can avoid that horror of horrors by doing some big time borrowing now to finance abolishing Social Security we won’t have to face that terrible fate a few decades from now.

Now I’m really not the biggest fan of entitlement programs myself, but the fact is, before Social Security there was even more of a problem with rampant poverty among the elderly than there is now. I don’t see how dismantling this program–which, just in case you missed it, _is not insolvent or in trouble at this time or likely any time in the next three decades_–can be a good thing.

Or, as an alternative, why not just be honest about what you’re doing. State, “Social Security is over.”, arrange to borrow the money to handle everyone over, say, 50 now, and then let me save my money how I wish. None of this forced saving bullshit.

Oh, yeah, I forgot, this isn’t about true choice–this is about how to funnel money from the pockets of the poor into the pockets of the well-off. So we’ll force people to invest in the stock market, which will mostly help stock brokers.

Feh.

Nine Inch Nails has a new album coming out

I’ve become resigned to the 5 year cycles that are all Trent seems to be able to achieve–yeah, yeah, I know that there’s always a ton of sub-releases in the intervening time (I’ve got a shelf full of them), but let’s face it: ??Pretty Hate Machine?? was 1989, ??The Downward Spiral?? was 1994, ??The Fragile?? was 1999–crap, this one’s going to be 6 years. He’s getting deep into Paul Simon territory here.

Because it’s ??NIN??, the fan community will, upon release, have to indulge in an immediate war about whether this is the best or worst album ever.

Imagine, then, my amusement at finding someone’s already released a “pre-emptive apologia”:http://www.theninhotline.net/meatpers/current.html for the album.

It will, I predict, be a fun rwar to watch, and I’m glad people are getting an early start.

Remember: ??With Teeth??

Warren Ellis has a blog

“Find it at http://www.diepunyhumans.com”:http://www.diepunyhumans.com/

This should be important to anyone who’s read ??Transmetropolitan?? (bet that one came out OK, Nova), and, well, _everyone_ should read ??Transmetropolitan??.

Oh, and that link where he says don’t look–seriously, don’t look. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. I need to go spend about three hours in the shower now.

“via William Gibson”:http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp

Brad DeLong has hypotheses about the roots of Free Software

“You can read the whole thing here”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000586.html

In response to “another article”:http://www.bopnews.com/archives/002532.html, wherein someone notes–mostly without suprise–that Linux is becoming a real contender for desktop use, Brad puts forth the following:

bq. There are two theories about open-source. The first is that while it has always been possible for a charismatic leader to call forth immense team effort and accomplish great things by force of inspiration and example alone, such enterprises are never stable. In the long run you need either the stick of potential punishment–call it the authority of the state–or the carrot of material reward–the market–in order to maintain a large social division of labor and preserve a project across any substantial length of time. Call this process the routinization of charisma.

On this theory, those parts of open-source that will survive are those that get successfully routinized: substantial companies with big revenue flows have to say to people, “We’ve hired you to work on open-source, specifically Linux.” Why would a company do this? Well, why was Microsoft so eager to make sure that the hardware specification for the IMB PC remained open? Anyone with a substantial market position in a neighboring segment can profit enormously from the expansion of the market that free-as-in-beer product provides. This is what IBM is doing now by supporting Linux: trying to remove or at least reduce the Windows tax on computers, and so grow the market in the business-services segment that IBM is close to dominating.

Think of it this way: Microsoft is like the late Roman Empire, IBM is like the Huns, and the Linux programmers are like the Goths. IBM’s support of Linux is the analogue of the Huns driving the Goths before them to soften up the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century.

The second theory is that it has been difficulties in communication and organization that have prevented the running of persistent, large-scale divisions of labor off of other human motives than fear and greed, but that now–thanks to the IT revolution–costs of communication and organization have dropped far enough that simple enthusiasm, curiosity, or the desire to demonstrate technical skill can attract enough part-time workers who can be coordinated enough to make meaningful contributions to an ongoing project.

It will be interesting to see what the answer is.

It is an interesting question. Despite having been on the inside of this for a long time, I have no idea what the answer is.

What a potentially interesting site

After reading that there was some sort of connection between the Allman Brothers’ ??In Memory of Elizabeth Reed?? and Miles Davis, I did a quick google search, and stumbled across “songfacts”:http://songfacts.com/, which has the potential to be an interesting site.

He’s big and red and files his horns

!http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00022S15M.01-A2X3FMBNSRPS6U._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg! reprint series. In fact, looking over “a list of his published work”:http://www.distrimagen.es/mignola/mignola.htm, that’s about all I think I was likely to have seen. I’m actually amazed that I’ve read so little of his stuff, because he certainly made an impression on me.

Well, I’ve also enjoyed reading ??Hellboy??, with its wisecracking take on neo-Lovecraftian horror, but I just picked that up in the last year.

So, as I said “some time ago”:/2004/02/ive-been-getting-back-into-comic-books-of-late.html (before the movie came out in theaters), I wasn’t sure how I’d like the movie adaptation.

In fact, I liked it just fine. I don’t think it was anything more than escapism, but I’m recovering from straining my back, and there are much worse ways to spend two hours stretched out on the couch. But, and I can’t stress this enough, don’t try and watch it with a pair of speakers whose cones have succumbed to dry rot. The constant flatulence is distracting.

I do believe we’re going to have to go out and buy some new speakers tomorrow.

The blessings of obsolete computer systems.

My el-cheapo wedding ring.

“As I had occasion to be reminded today”:http://miscellaneousheathen.com/2004/11/24#051124engaged, I needed a new wedding ring.

Now, I went the first 6 3/4 years of my marriage without one. For the first couple, well, it would have given it away–although, in retrospect, there could have been a lot of fun in watching people figure it out–and for a good while after that we just had more important things upon which to spend money.

Finally, though, in 2001, flush with money from The California Job, Anne and I went and got rings.

Now, I’m not much of a jewelry person; I have a class ring that I don’t wear, and that’s pretty much it. I haven’t even owned a watch this millennium. But (never one to be without an opinion) I know I don’t care for yellow gold, which pretty much drove us to platinum.

This of course made them expensive, but if you figure in the wedding we didn’t pay for, the years of our lives not lost to wedding-induced stress, etc., it still seemed like a bargain.

Within a year, I had lost it, I believe somewhere within the confines of our own house.

This was the moment when platinum seemed sorta foolish.

Well, that was three years ago, but I finally decided it was time to replace it. So we went back to Ross-Simon, with a card we had from when we got the originals, thinking we could just give them the little code on the card, and have them order a new one up.

They had changed computer systems.

The code we had no longer meant anything to their system, and no visual inspection of catalogs produced an identical match. Although we initially took them up on their offer to try and research what our original bands were, after walking around for half an hour, we decided that it was not a point of obsession to us that the bands actually match–so we marched back down, and started looking at options.

Now, I’m sure it labels me as a geek–were there any doubt–that as soon as I heard _titanium_, I was intrigued. I was also convinced that it must be expensive–I mean, this is the stuff they make tail sections of F4s out of so they can withstand the heat (if you look at a picture, like “this”:http://www.vogue-web.ch/f4/F-4D-65-0596.jpg, it’s the shiny bits behind and above the exhaust), it’s got to be expensive, right?

Nope. Wrong. Light as a feather, virtually indestructible, and if I lose this one, well, they’re not quite disposable, but they don’t cost much more than a meal at a good restaurant.

Incidentally, you _must_ check out “this video of an F4 being used to crash-test a wall for a nuclear facility”:http://www.big-boys.com/articles/concreteplane.html. The plane disappears more or less without a trace.

No rest for the wicked

This is a little tardy, but I feel I must mention that as of roughly 10 PM CST November 22, 2004, I have a new nephew, Nigel Sanford Berry.

On the subject of the name, I can only speculate that my brother in law (Hi, Cory!) didn’t think that naming his first son Calvin Rufus Berry was sufficient revenge on his parents for naming him Corlis–I wish, though, he had opted for therapy instead of a path that willguarantee his sons get beat up every day after school. It’s just a little too “sins of the grandparents” meets Darwin.

Then again, Patrick has a daughter named Hadley. Maybe it’s something in the water.

I’ve decided I’m going to call Nige “Junior”, since he shares a middle name with his dad–I have a nasty feeling that’s going to be a stand-out accomplishment in this family. I mean, what are they gonna call any daughters that turn up? Petunia Eglantine Berry? Calliope Dorothea Berry?

Just thinking of a child named Calliope makes me laugh. Boy will I feel guilty if that ever comes to pass.

Seriously, I look forward to seeing him at Christmas, no matter how bald, pink, wrinkled, noisy and smelly he may be.

My days of router hackery are over…

I broke down and did what I’d recently recommended to someone else–I bought a Linksys WRT54GS, and then I ponied up the $20/year for the subscription to sveasoft.com’s super-firmware.

(Yes, I know there’s some conflict about GPL compliance WRT sveasoft.com, although from my understanding of the issues (that they want to restrict circulation of betas), I don’t have a problem with it, really.)

Boy, I am awfully pleased.

For < $100 all told, I got 802.11g (though I am having one bastard of a time finding a cardbus card with an in-kernel driver), a four-port switch (though I’m really only using one), a router, a VPN server (albeit PPTP), a dhcp server that’ll do static address assignments, a local DNS server that cooperates with it, and no doubt a bunch of other stuff I haven’t discovered yet.

I don’t generally like consumer hardware, but sometimes they get it right.

Cool.

!http://a1055.g.akamai.net/f/1055/1401/5h/images.barnesandnoble.com/images/8570000/8570407.gif! is one of the definitive Computer Science textbooks. It was also, for years, the book that defined the scheme language. It’s big, and dense and fairly expensive.

Imagine my suprise, then, that MIT Press has apparently “made the entire thing available for free on the web”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html.