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  • It was ever thus

    Tech support through the ages.

    [youtube_sc url=eRjVeRbhtRU]

  • _The Last Picture Show_

    Anne and I have had a copy of this out from Netflix for, I’m not kidding you, three months. We _finally_ got around to watching it last night.

    To say that I’m glad I didn’t grow up in a small town–I spent a fair amount of time in small-ish towns, but always as a transient outsider–is perhaps obvious.

    It’s got a lot of the flaws I anticipated, but that anticipation is at least partly informed by the existence of this movie–it isn’t impossible to see how it would have been fresh and new, oh, you know, around the time I was born. So it’s worth seeing, even if only as a historical document.

    I must say, though, what the hell happened to Timothy Bottoms? Looking at “his bio on imdb”:http://imdb.com/name/nm0000961/, I swear, it seems like this is the only movie he’s done (perhaps other than _Texasville_) that was really worth doing. Weird.

  • Honya Budo

    I am obviously not enlightened, for while I occasionaly show signs of being an adept at “Honya Budo”:http://liw.iki.fi/liw/log/2007-01.html#20070116b, I often fail to be able to even master the “Way of the In-Out”.

  • Home

    It’s always good to be back.

    That we stepped off the plane and immediately drove to the opening of our friend Lila’s “new yoga studio”:http://gatewayyoga.com/, where, much as we expected, we ran into a bunch of people in the kula, and got to tell them about our trip and hear about how we were missed during free week and generally catch up, and then we went to dinner at an “excellent pizza place”:http://www.lillyspizza.com/, well, it definitely made us happy to be home again.

  • I’m in ur coffeeshop eatin’ ur breakfast

    My favorite coffe house/cafe in DC

    Well, on the one hand, I’m sorry that the 2-hour practice class that I had intended to go to isn’t on today–I found this out from the teacher at the class that we went to yesterday.

    But the class last night, after a lot of walking, has left me worn out anyway. So instead I’m enjoying tasty food.

  • I had no idea

    You learn something new if you pay attention

    This is the bridge that lies between our hotel and Adams-Morgan. As many times as I’ve crossed it, I’d never noticed the name.

  • MySQL continues to play catch-up

    So, slashdot had “a story about the new Falcon storage engine for MySQL”:http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/69904889/article.pl. I don’t care for MySQL for a number of reasons, but some–though not all–could be alleviated with a better storage back-end. So I cruised over to check out “the Falcon feature-set”:http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-falcon-features.html.

    Funny enough, with the exception of the next to the last point–which is a potentially non-trivial point, I admit–this is all stuff that PostgreSQL has had for years.

    One day, people are going to realize that MySQL has been playing catch-up for the last few years.  The amount of effort people have to do to work around MySQL’s long-standing issues with concurrency and lack of ACID-compliance in its default configuration, and it’s lack of good performance in the configurations that _do_ have those characteristics always amazes me, especially when PostgreSQL has Simply Worked for a long, long time.

  • Mmmmmmmmm

    The best sushi place I've ever gone

    If I lived in DC, I’d end up awfully fat from eating like this at lunch. As it is, I try to make a pilgrimage to “Sushi Taro”:http://sushitaro.com/ when I’m in town, because it’s the best sushi I’ve ever had. From left to right, there’s eel, smoked salmon, amberjack and two kinds of mackerel. I’m not sure what the last probably says about me.

  • How popular is _your_ name?

    So after “the Water Callers’ performance”:/2006/12/the-water-callers.html the other night, I said hi to one of the performers, Bart, and after greeting me by name, he expressed some surprise at having, in fact, remembered it. I, in turn, made what in retrospect sounds like a bit of a graceless comment about how it was a good guess, regardless, since it was the most popular name for male children around the time I was born.

    So we ended up chatting about the subject of name popularity and such, and he mentioned having played with some resources when some friends were trying to pick names for their immanent child, and the “weird names people are picking these days”:/2004/11/no-rest-for-the-wicked.html, and how Matthew still gets around even though there was no Beatle by that name, etc.

    So, in one of those coincidences that often happens “a Linux hacker”:http://spyderous.livejournal.com/86490.html noted a reference to a site that the Social Security administration has “that lets you look at name popularity”:http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/.

    It turns out, 1970 was just the tip of the iceberg–in the last 60 years, there’s only been 16 where Michael _wasn’t_ #1. And while my name has kept its place pretty solidly, as you look at different decades, others shift wildly. I mean, the idea of Joshua being more popular than John strikes me as improbably, but it the 80s, that came to be the case, and the idea that Jacob is more popular than Michael in the 00s seems even weirder. And Christopher, which has been the consistent #2 in the 70s and 80s–another interesting fact I wasn’t aware of–is out of the top 10.

    Anyway, I guess this illustrates nothing so much as there’s no accounting for taste, however you look at it.

  • What a different person I feel like

    So, last night we went over to some friends’ house to celebrate the end of 2006 and the advent of 2007. And as the fateful moment approached our timezone, in an effort to keep ourselves awake, we discussed our respective worst moments of 2006.

    It’s unsurprising, really, that, as couples who’ve both been together for some time, each pair came up with lists that were more or less identical. And 2006 wasn’t the best of all possible years for any of us.

    But at the same time, looking back on all the things that seemed like they belonged on such a list, I had a hard time feeling any of them were entirely negative, or even feeling that my year was particularly hard–it’s not easy or fun to lose a cat after a protracted illness, or find your spouse asking whether staying together was the right thing to do, but those sorts of things can also be the events that make you stop and reengage with your life.

    I don’t know that I would regard those events the same way if they had happened two years ago or five years ago or ten years ago. I feel like a very different person sometimes.

    And then, the clock having run out, we got introduced to “an awkwardly funny Spanish new-years ritual”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Grapes—the eating of 12 grapes with each toll of the bell that marks midnight (not, mind you, that we had a good bell-tower handy).

    Let’s just say that the wikipedia article is right. 12 grapes that fast is, at best hard, and much more likely to devolve into a roomful of people looking like squirrels getting ready for winter. We were definitely the latter. Avoiding spit-takes was a real act of will.

    You should definitely try it next year.

  • A little late

    A few minutes before midnight, 2006-12-31

  • Already the well runs dry

    Well, I’m sure not going to blog about Saddam Hussein, and I’ve “already blogged about”:http://www.tendentious.org/food/pho_cali the Vietnamese restaurant we went to yesterday, and while an amusing experience, the hispanic supermarket we went to yesterday:http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/ wasn’t _that_ earth-shattering (having been to one of the Fiestas in Houston, it’s pretty small potatoes, really).

    And I’m otherwise occupied with making tortilla using “this Cook’s Illustrated recipe”:http://soup.cooksillustrated.com/recipes/Tortilla_Soup/2168 (warning, it’s behind a membership firewall, but you can find a copy someone’s put on the web “here”:http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~seck/kitchen/tortilla_soup.htm).

    Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up with a bunch of New Years Resolutions that I won’t keep. Once I wake up.

  • The Water Callers

    I was involved in the prior discussion while at a performance by “The Water Callers”:http://www.myspace.com/thewatercallers, a local pair. If you go to the myspace page, I would suggest you listen to _In The Moonlight_, which I think is the best of the tracks they’ve got posted, though not the best they’ve written.

    It was fun, even if it does end up with me posting this after midnight. We saw a number of people from the kula there, some expected, some not. I don’t think we’ve been as likely to run into people we know out of the blue since living in Tuscaloosa.

    It’s rather nice.

  • Divestiture

    I’ve decided to get rid of a lot of books. Mostly, but probably not exclusively, technical books. Many, but not all, fairly up to date. The fact is that for years I’ve bought them simply out of habit–I browse them, or maybe even actually sit down and read them, and discover that there’s little in them that I didn’t already know. And then they go on the bookshelves, or the floor, and take up space.

    Getting a subscription to “Safari”:http://safari.oreilly.com has made them doubly redundant.

    If nothing changes, one day there will be a nice layer of humus where this house was from all the books that slowly composted–so here’s your chance to benefit from my compulsive behavior: I’m giving them away. I’m going to be going through the shelves over the next few weeks, and entering all the items in “a Google Spreadsheet”:http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pTyL0Vsb4VwTwPEgPlmD2Zg; if you see something you want (I imagine you could subscribe to the RSS feed for the sheet for best results), email me at mdorman@tendentious.org, and I’ll see about boxing it up and shipping it.

    I may look into what’s involved in being able to accept some compensation through my paypal account–I just want to cover the cost of packaging and shipping, but this could be a lot of books, and even at book rate, it can add up.

    If you know anyone who might be interested, please point them to the spreadsheet as well.

  • _Sous vide_ on a budget

    “Ted Tso”:http://tytso.livejournal.com/–better known as a Linux kernel hacker–documents a way to do _sous vide_ cooking using a slow cooker.

    This is the technique that you occasionally see on _Iron Chef America_, using special units that heat and circulate water at very precise temperatures. Using a slow cooker makes it a bit more accessible as a technique.

    Funny enough, I seem to have just gotten one of those for Xmas…

  • _A Streetcar Named Desire_

    I was just present for a discussion of a production of _A Streetcar Named Desire_.

    With zombies.

    Heh.

  • Busy as hell

    !/2006/12/29/1.png! I truly have been busy as hell the last few days. It’s a pretty good sort of busy, I suppose–I’ve rewritten huge chunks of code (we now no longer have a stand-alone spam checking daemon, it’s instead managed through postfix, which makes a certain sort of sense), implemented a number of new independent processes, etc.

    And that’s just what’s happening in my little *intense development* branch; Chris and Dad have been working away on web stuff, with me providing the occasional prod to keep them on course.

    Which brings me to the real purpose of this post: cool distributed version control tricks, AKA pretty pictures!

    The image attached here is a graph of the revision history of the system. All those lines done together like spaghetti towards the bottom? That’s the sort of mildly disturbing pattern you see when people really start to get used to working with a distributed system–merging from one another as stuff goes along, perhaps from other branches they work on, back from the master, etc.

    I don’t know why I think it’s so cool, but I do.

  • Moving to TypePad

    I have decided to get out of not only the blog-software-writing habit (a bad tendency anyway, and one I never really had the spare time to give proper attention), but out of the blog-software-hosting gig.

    I’ve got all the old posts imported (ah, beloved perl, an hour to hack together something to convert 500-odd posts), and I’ll be redirecting the URL to typepad shortly.

  • So, one of the things I was looking for…

    was moblogging capabilities. Typepad even provides a Treo app to facilitate it. This is the obligatory test.

  • Mapping lyrics of songs

    What if “your song lyrics were a state machine?”:http://www.whatspop.com/blog/2006/11/glancing-alternative-song-structures.cfm

  • The Gods don’t want me blogging

    I finally post the first item here in, what, three months, and the next day things come down the pike that virtually guarantee I won’t have a lot of time for the next however-long.

    All I will say that if that old saw about “When a door closes, a window opens.” is true, I’m the guy whose efforts to open the window just went from vigorous to mildly frantic.

  • Schroedinger’s Ball, Adam Felber

    Although I’ve not succeeded in catching a broadcast in a long time, I maintain a great deal of affection for NPR’s “_Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!_”:http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/. As a result, when I was in “Quail Ridge Books”:http://quailridgebooks.booksense.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp on Friday–it being perhaps not entirely surprising that the onset of the Christmas season tends to drive me more to local retailers, even though I’m generally content to browse at Barnes & Noble most of the time–I picked up (among other things), “Adam Felber”:http://fanaticalapathy.org/’s _Schroedinger’s Ball_.

    It’s a decent way to pass a few hours–not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re moderately familiar with Cambridge, where almost all of it takes place, it is perhaps more amusing than if you’re not–for instance, a scene takes place in the _Bow & Arrow_ (which, Googling tells me, 1) was the bar in _Good Will Hunting_ and 2) apparently no longer exists), in which I have actually been drinking. And drunk.

    There are various other landmarks mentioned (The Coop, the _Au Bon Pain_) or alluded to (for instance, “_Grendel’s Den_”:http://www.grendelsden.com/, which I’ll note is probably the only a restaurant in the US that has a link on its website to “a US Supreme Court decision”:http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=459&invol=116 on it. Or, at least, a case that directly involves them).

    In fact, it is perhaps telling that the things I find myself mentioning are all about the context in which it takes place. It _is_ an amusing book, and has some clever bits, but it is short, and it is fluffy. But that’s exactly what I was looking for, so please don’t consider this a complaint.

    After a couple more fluffy books, of course, I intend to start the new Pynchon novel. That should be anything but.

  • Ah, Andre, we hardly knew ye

    OK, so guest starring on ER would have hardly been a significant feather in his cap, but oh how it hurts to hear that Andre Braugher turned that down to “be in the second Fantastic Four movie”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=3&id=37645.

    I rented the first one, and still felt a bit cheated. I can’t imagine the second would be any better. But who know, I suppose they could really pull out the stops and Do Galactus Right.

  • The Jim Henly one-two punch

    Over at “Unqualified Offerings”:http://highclearing.com/, Jim Henly has, first, “a solution”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/08/24/5428 for when your 17-year-old wants his girlfriend to sleep over. Best of all, it should be fun for the parents in a number of ways.

    Second, he has “the fortune cookie response”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/08/24/5427 to neoconservative fortune cookie plans.

  • And the newsmedia wonders why no one takes them seriously anymore?

    What a bunch of fucking slackers.

    No, I’m not talking about their shitty reporting on the run-up to war, or their unwillingness to hold a crap administration’s feet to the fire for what they’re not doing for the American people.

    No, right now I’m talking about unattributed theft of text from Wikipedia. To wit (from “the Fetus In Fetu”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus_in_fetu article on WP):

    bq. _Fetus in fetu_ (or Foetus in foeto) describes an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. It continues to survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

    From “an ABC news article on someone so afflicted”:http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2346476&page=1:

    bq. It is an extremely rare abnormality that involves a fetus getting trapped inside of its twin. The trapped fetus can survive as a parasite even past birth by forming an umbilical cord-like structure that leeches its twin’s blood supply until it grows so large that it starts to harm the host, at which point doctors usually intervene.

    Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if, by now, they’ve not realized they’ve been called and have changed the text…which is even more chickenshit.

  • But could they really make it incoherent enough?

    So, apparently Christopher Nolan is almost on board to “direct a movie version of _The Prisoner_”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=3&id=37460.

    Now I don’t really remember much about the original show–even though MTV rebroadcast it while I was in college (I had no TV, and, honestly, I really didn’t miss it)–but the lasting impression I have is one of a show playing “hide the ball” with important bits of information to the point of incoherence. While I don’t mind that _per se_–and maybe it wouldn’t have seemed so had the show not had a very short run, meaning they perhaps weren’t able to explain things they intended to later–I have to wonder how that would play with mainstream movie audiences.

    Still, with a good writing team, I would expect Chris Nolan to be able to make a credible go of it.

  • How could I not share?

    “Anthrax pays a surprise visit to the set of Battlestar Galactica”:http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=37442.

    With tracks paying homage to comic books (“_Judge Dredd_”:http://www.lyricsfreak.com/a/anthrax/i+am+the+law_20008482.html), horror novels (_Misery_ in “Misery Loves Company”), and movies (_Blue Velvet_ in “Now It’s Dark”), can a track dissing Cylons be far behind?

  • Haven’t looked at the stats in a while

    Given my repeated and persistent absences from posting, it should come as little surprise that I also haven’t bothered to look at my web stats either. Given that this whole edifice is about my narcissistic need to make my snappy patter available to the web, how could it not hurt to find out that my never-exactly-legion fans had abandoned me?

    Anyway, just because I haven’t looked at them doesn’t mean that the stats haven’t been collected, and after a week of blogging a couple of stories a day, I figured, “What the hell?”

    Well, the numbers are the numbers–ultimately, I don’t believe that I’ve had 62 distinct visitors in the last 8 days, etc., etc. Most of it is probably just bot traffic, etc. But the thing that always makes this worthwhile are the searches. Sadly *Live Sex Chet* is nowhere to be found, but we do get:

    1) do the heathen go to heaven?

    and

    2) two queries about “coordinates from _Feasting On Asphalt_”:/2006/08/if-you-like-alton-brown.html, which makes me think there’s an audience for someone to scribble down the coordinates and post them on a blog. Perhaps that will be me.

  • NPR to the rescue

    So, my dad and I have had a long-running debate over whether or not we should be including spam with so-called “Poison Paragraphs” in the corpus we hand-manage for “AnteSpam’s”:http://antespam.com/ Bayesian database.

    I’ve long maintained that the right solution is to just bung it in there–the text that is generally being inserted is generally far too atypical of real emails to make a difference. Dad was more hesitant.

    With this in mind, I tried to be gracious when he called to mention that NPR had “a story”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5624749, including an interview with “Paul Graham”:http://paulgraham.com/, the guy who “first proposed using Bayesian analysis”:http://paulgraham.com/spam.html, who confirmed that it really wasn’t a problem.

  • Wow

    OK, so “Chris Toshok”:http://squeedlyspooch.com/blog/ has apparently “been dinking away”:http://squeedlyspooch.com/blog/archives/002069.html with making Turtle, which I gather is a GPS-monitoring package of some sort, hook up with “F-Spot”:http://f-spot.org/Main_Page, so that, based on timestamps in your photos, you can pinpoint where they were taken.

    And then you can export the locations of the photos to google maps and the like.

    It’s apparently all very much under development, doesn’t yet work for anyone else, etc., and, for all I know, it may already be a feature of every commercial photo management package in the world. But damn, it sure seems like a neat idea.