Blog: Archive for May, 2001

Wow! Apple came out with a cool new toy.

I hope to have a new machine by the end of the year, and while I really like the idea of having a notebook computer, I don't really want my main machine to be a notebook. The new iBook is cheap enough that I can probably justify getting a really nice desktop machine, and also get the iBook for those times that having a notebook would be nice (going on trips, doing some writing in the backyard or at a cafe, etc.).

Not, mind you, that I would say no if someone gave me a Titanium G4 PowerBook. I still might win one, after all. (Although the chances of that are, admittedly, pretty slim.)

I did kind of like the old iBooks, though. They were fun in a way that the new design isn't. On the other hand, the new design is much, much sexier.

When the Titanium G4 PowerBook came out, I dissed its keyboard, based on having played with the keyboard on an iBook. It's not that bad, although the keys are really large—larger than those on a normal keyboard—which I find bizarre.

Tom Bihn has some really cool laptop bags, including some that fit the G4 TiBook.

An interview with the Bros. Quay.
Via the theremin chronicles.

Noam Chomsky talks sense about Third World debt, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, “free trade”, the modern protest movement, dismantling of state universities and colleges, privacy in the Internet age, and more. Chomsky has a wonderful way of saying things that sound like conspiracy theories, but are usually true.
Via the null device.

A history of Linux on the PowerPC architecture.

Salon has an interview with Eugenie Scott (executive director of the The National Center for Science Education) about a new bill the Louisiana state legislature is trying to pass that claims that Darwin's theory of evolution is responsible for racism. Um, yeah—Louisiana wants to ban evolution because it would justify their history of slavery and racism.

We went to see Wo Hu Zang Long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) at midnight. On the way, we passed some huge police kerfuffle on the Lougheed Highway. I initially thought it was a drinking-driving roadblock, but it turned out that they had the westbound side of the road blocked off with a police car, so we figured it must have been some kind of serious accident.

The film was okay, but I didn't think it even began to justify the hype. In fact, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't been hearing how great it was for several months. M, who liked it a lot more than I did, wondered if it wasn't doomed from the start because it starred Chow Yun-Fat, who bored us in The Replacement Killers, which was technically brilliant, but left me being impressed more by some of the background detail. (Such as the architectural features of Mira Sorvino's office or apartment or whatever it was. Similar observation from this movie: the clothes looked pretty comfortable.)

After seeing the police (not to mention the fact that that part of the Lougheed Highway is awful at night), we'd decided to take a different route home. Unfortunately, it turned out that the intersection we needed to turn at was the one the police had blocked off (on the far side). The turn lane was blocked with cones so I decided to turn from the head of the intersection.

I pulled up behind a car stopped at the intersection, and waited through one and a half light cycles while the woman in the car sat, frozen by the strobes and the need to choose a different route. I finally pulled around her, and turned right from the second lane. The rest of our trip was fine, and we arrived home at about two-thirty in the morning.

Wow, what a day!

Around nine o'clock this morning, the immigration lawyer working on M's visa called. She got up and talked to him while I tried to get back to sleep.

We got up officially around eleven o'clock. We messed around with computers a bit, ate breakfast while watching an episode of Daria we'd seen several times before (the one where Daria falls asleep with the television on and dreams about Kevin being murdered), and finally left around one o'clock for downtown.

The traffic was pretty heavy, but survivable (the bus strike is a drag, and it's really obvious that the government doesn't really feel like it has a stake in solving it). M had problems with her credit card in the parking meter, so we ended up using mine and calling to get a new one for her (my best guess is that the “problematic till” in the new Save On Foods partially demagnetized her card). Then we headed to Gastown, wading through tourists, to look for cards.

We ended up with quite a selection—I found several that I thought were amazingly cool, although none of them were Mother's Day cards, as usual. I have a hard time with cards in general—I usually either find cards that are too cool to send, or nothing that even comes close to communicating my feelings. It's pretty rare for me to find a card that works for both me and the recipient (the last big exception was the amazing Edward Gorey Christmas cards I found for our brothers).

From the card shop, we ended up in the downtown SFU bookstore, which was pretty much out of remaindered books (I had picked up a copy of Daniel Dennett's Brainchildren for about CN$3 on my last visit). We still managed to spend quite a while there, marvelling at a new book by Larry Niven, looking at various children's books, and wandering into the stationery area where we scribbled with some new gel pens from Stadtler-Mars. As we drifted out, we looked through the gifts, which included the sarcastic magic 8-Ball and various tin “snackboxes” I'd seen in the Archie McPhee catalog. The best of these was the “The Enemy is Syphilis” box. We should have bought it, but it was just too weird. Maybe we'll go back, though....

Next up was A&B Sound, where we were roundly ignored at the digital camera display (granted, we weren't buying today, but it's on our list of things to do sometime soon). We did, however, find a Lloyd Cole CD, Love Story, that M hadn't even heard of, along with lots of copies of his latest CD, The Negatives, which M got for Christmas from her parents. (It's really good!)

We checked Sam the Record Man (right next door), but the only Lloyd Cole they had was The Collection, which we have. Neither store, of course, had the new New Order single, which I gather is out to radio stations (at least in Australia, as Andrew has apparently heard it). [Insert rant about Vancouver radio here.]

On the way to the Granville Book Company, we stopped at the downtown London Drugs store (in the building that used to be the flagship Duthie Books). They turned out to have all three of our top digital camera candidates (or earlier models), which are, if you care, the Canon ELPH S300, the Canon G1, and the Nikon CoolPix 995. So we got a chance to actually hold the cameras and play with the controls a bit.

They also had a G4 Mac with the 22" Apple Cinema Display. Wow. I'd never actually seen one before, only pictures, and it seems like most pictures of monitors don't have any useful clues as to their scale. This monitor is huge. You can fit six 80 character x 24 line Terminals on it with loads of room above and below. You can fit two letter-size print previews next to one another with room for half of another. It's amazing. If only it were about US$2000 cheaper....

GBC turned out to not have Tim Powers' Declare, my number one birthday obsession, but they did have the latest Pratchett in paper (The Fifth Elephant) and, in the remaindered section, a strange CD based on Iain Banks's novel The Bridge, for half off CN$30. So we got them both. I still haven't heard enough of the CD to know what it's meant to be.

So we went to Chapters (Evil Chapters), who, it turned out did have two copies of Declare. Of course they weren't actually filed where they belonged, and where their clever computer stock form said they should be. (Theoretically, Declare, which deals with the sinister events behind the Cold War, is a “mainstream” book, and Chapters (Evil Chapters) claimed to have filed it as such. It turned out that their two copies (now only one!) were in the science fiction section, although I thought we'd looked there, too. What can you expect from a store that shelved Donald Norman's Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles in the automotive section?)

Anyway, as much as I hate to give Chapters (Evil Chapters) money, I really wanted the book, and I was annoyed at Granville for not having it, and at Duthie's for overreaching and forcing them to close all their downtown stores. (And I just know that had we gone out to their only remaining store, they wouldn't have had it—now, of course, they'll have a dozen copies.) M chatted to the clerk, who'd tried to pitch their lame membership program, which gives you a pathetic 10% discount and costs money to join, to boot! (I view all such programs as crap after having had a 30% off deal for next to nothing from Twilight Book and Game in Syracuse, where I spent tons of money, and having an absolutely free membership from Stacey's Books in San Francisco, where I got 10% off plus 10% of my purchases toward a US$10 gift certificate after I spent US$100! If the discount isn't at least a little bit more than the sales tax, it's not a discount. And sales tax here is 14% (7% PST; 7% GST).)

Anyway, the clerk told her that Chapters had been bought (we'd heard about the offer, but not that it had gone through), and that the new owners were planning some major changes. He pointed out that they'd already begun a program to discourage people from hanging around in the store—they don't let people take books or magazines into the cafes on the top two floors anymore, and they've gotten rid of most of the chairs and couches they used to have to discourage browsing. I pointed out to him that without those features, people might as well buy from Amazon. But, hey, if Chapters (Evil Chapters) wants to commit suicide, I won't stand in their way.

Back to the car, with a stop at Worldwide Books and Maps to see what they had (some interesting big wall maps, but not as cool as the Defense Mapping Agency map on the wall of Hagen's Travel here in Burnaby).

Then we went to the grocery store, bought various staples (milk, bagels, cookies) and various naughty things (ice cream, Cap'n Crunch, Fry's Cocoa Powder), and got home about twenty minutes before Buffy.

We had two new messages on the machine. The first was bizarre—it seemed like some sort of industrial music performance: voices faded in and out, snatches of music, strange grinding, tapping, and windlike sounds. Finally, though, I heard a voice I recognized: M's advisor. Our best guess is that he'd called with his cell phone, reached the answering machine, and hung up, only he hadn't really hung up, and the machine kept recording everything it could hear while he walked around with the phone in his pocket. (Thanks to Second Sight, a BBC mystery that aired on PBS last week, whose most important clue came when Ross Tanner didn't close his mobile phone properly and his wife was able to figure out where he was to call and let him know by listening 'til she recognized someone's voice.)

The other message was from my California landlord, who also wasn't sure whether he'd reached the machine or we were listening to him but not talking. After trying to get someone to answer, he said that he'd gotten mail from the DMV for me, and that it was marked “Open Immediately, Important Information Inside”. My heart sank, so I called him back right away so I could know, and get on with planning an extremely inconvenient trip.

But it turned out that they'd actually sent me my license! And not just a piece of paper with the real thing to come later, but the real thing itself. Now all I have to do is arrange to get it into my hands.

The only downer of the day was poor Tara being mindsucked by the evil Glory on Buffy. Willow's response was impressive, though, and the wackiness of Scooby Doo on Zombie Island, a loving tribute to the show (which I never really liked that much) helped, too. (Highlights include: the gang breaking up because learning that all the creepy stuff was caused by greedy people in masks got boring; Shaggy's suitcase full of those green shirts he always wears; Fred's trying on that stupid scarf, looking at himself in the mirror, and saying, “Nah!”; no Casey Kasem.)

Happy birthday to me! Actually, all went well, despite some fluster over the (free-range, hopefully happy) chicken that M and I roasted (a first for both of us). It turned out yummy.

I still haven't started reading Declare or The Fifth Elephant, opting instead to continue my somewhat insane program of skimming Iain Banks's books for character names to use as machine names. (I also have an even crazier idea about assembling an “encyclopedia” of Iain Banks work, but I think I'd need some help with that one....)

perosteck or balveda (Consider Phlebas) are high on the list for my next desktop machine; sharrow (Against a Dark Background) is still the top candidate for my next notebook.

For context, my current machine, a PowerCenter 132 running Debian GNU/Linux, is called diziet. Our (totally wonderful) LaserJet 4000N is petrain (Use of Weapons; “State of the Art”). At my last full time job, I had a desktop machine running Windows NT called dloan and a laptop called zefla. Before that, I had a Linux box (Red Hat 2.1) called quincy and a Windows 95 box called sam.

Right-wing christianist fundies have decided to take their anti-gay message to the schools. Believe it or not, they believe their children are being prevented from expressing their hatred of gays and lesbians, and that's just not fair! What's next—sponsorship of high school Klan groups to talk about the good ol' days of slavery? Maybe some anti-Semitic groups, too....
Via the null device.

The obligatory link to the new NoLogo site.
Via the null device.

The remains of the chicken we roasted on Sunday turned into chicken in a mushroom, garlic, and red pepper sauce, wrapped in crepes, with more sauce on top, and a pot of stock.

Got my new license today. California has changed the card a bit—zoomed out the main picture so you can see more than just my face, added a second, smaller picture, added state seal holograms all over the place, and used a flimsier, thinner card. I'm not sure whether i like it as much as the older one, but at least I can drive again.

I'll be building the new Mozilla sometime today (or maybe tonight—it takes several hours to build on my poor machine). I would really love to be able to use Mozilla, but so far it's been completely unusable—too slow, too buggy, and too likely to die. Still, I give it a try every time they release a new milestone. My old Netscape (if you find a newer Netscape than 4.73 built for PPC Linux, please e-mail me) is also buggy, dies at random intervals, and is utterly non-standards compliant, but is reasonably responsive. I've also been experimenting with Konqueror, which is (mostly) standards compliant and reasonably fast when it's in use, but uses tons of memory that can cause my “poor, pathetic, old” machine, which is probably a hundred times faster with way more memory than the machines I started on that served hundreds of users at a time, to thrash fiendishly.

While I'm thinking about web browsers, if anyone knows of tools that can produce *.ico files, let me know. I thought it might be fun to have a favicon.ico file for my site, but haven't been able to find any non-Windows tools to produce the files.

Most of the stuff I did find involved Linux people speculating on whether they could crash Internet Explorer or even Windows by placing favicon.ico files containing batch files, Windows executables, or huge amounts of random data. Nice attitude, guys.

I built Mozilla overnight. It took—no kidding—7 hours, 41 minutes to build, and ate about 600 MB of disk space.

And it was completely unusable. Pages I can view in tens of seconds in Netscape (including Dave Winer's complicated Scripting News) took an average of 400 seconds to render in Mozilla. Mozilla's memory demands also caused my machine to start thrashing. A dpkg -r later, and I was once again Mozilla-free. Maybe next time, kids.

Meanwhile, M broke our doorknob. Granted, it had been acting up for a while, but M made the definitive break. I took it apart to see if we could trivially fix it, and had the central shaft fall out, followed by the lock cylinder popping off.

So we bought a new knob from the somewhat evil, but mighty convenient, Home Despot. It even turned out that we could have the lock rekeyed to match our existing locks, thus saving us the cost of a deadbolt. The new lock and knob is much nicer than the old one—shiny and solid.

We also made pilgrimages to FedEx, to pick up some envelopes and forms, to the university so M could pick up some documents, and then to FedEx again to send them off (alas, too late for that day's pickup). And another visit to our local London Drugs in search of videotapes, which involved a sidetrip to poke at digital cameras and wonder at Mission Impossible 2 on LCD monitors (looking for ghosting).

M got it in her head that having a CD-RW drive would be a Good Thing™ after looking through The Computer Paper. It wasn't hard to convince me—I haven't got recent backups of most of my stuff, and my system is very unstable (kswapd can very easily be pushed into permanent thrashing, requiring a hard reboot and lengthy fscks to recover). Not to mention that I promised my cousin a tape of stuff he hadn't heard but should about four years ago, and then ended up moving around and leaving my stereo in storage (I still don't have it back). A CD could make it up to him.

So off we went to our semi-local small computer store in search of a Panasonic drive. While we were there, some guy came in to buy an LG 8120B, which he claimed was better. After some poking around on the Web at the store, M decided she agreed, and bought the LG drive.

When we got home, she tried to install it and get it to work. As usual, I stayed out of her way.

Physically installing the drive was a breeze. But actually getting it to work with Linux, well, that hasn't actually happened yet. I tried not to ask too many questions, but here's my understanding of what's happened so far:

With the 2.4 “stable” kernel that shipped with Red Hat 7.1, using cdrecord (the standard Unix CD burning program), M got interrupt errors and disk corruption.

Trying the latest 2.2 series kernel still resulted in interrupt errors.

So her latest venture is to install *gasp* Windows, in hopes of discovering whether the drive works at all. And she's caught up in the wonders of Windows 95, running on a machine that was high end when Windows 95 came out. So, among other fun consequences, I am offline—my machine can't talk to the 'Net, I can't get or send e-mail, and I can't even TeX anything using Kepler, Cronos, or any of our other multiple-master fonts.

What with not having real 'Net access and all, I've finished my crazy Banks' character names project, and now I'm teetering on the brink of working my way through How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, which is an “Open-Source Textbook”. I was able to download the LaTeX source, do a bunch of work to make it look vaguely attractive, and print it out. Although the content is sound, I think that the book needs some serious editorial attention, if only to fix the LaTeX code to conform to the standards. The images in the book, although they're in EPS format, were clearly made using bitmap fonts and generated at screen resolution, which means they're terribly foggy in my 1200 dpi printout....

In any case, I think it might help me learn Python, which seems like an interesting and somewhat more formal language than Perl, which I can flop around in. (I actually understood Perl 4 pretty well, then Perl 5 came along and introduced lots of complex features that I've never been able to get a logical hold on, although I can figure things out well enough to get some fairly complicated scripts working.) One of M's longtime criticisms of me is my lack of ability to think like a computer scientist (OTOH, one of my longtime criticisms of her is her tendency to think like a computer scientist, leading her to an otherwise inexplicable fondness for puns and deliberate misinterpretations of perfectly sound English statements), and Python and this book might help me to get some perspective on the topic.

M is active in the functional-programming community, and at one time was enthusiastic about my learning Standard ML, but was forced to admit that none of the books she was familiar with were very good for beginners (not, mind you, that they aren't meant for beginners, just that they aren't very good).

I'm still putting off diving into Powers's Declare in hopes of increasing my enjoyment of the book when I do make the plunge.

After installing Windows, M rebooted to Linux so she could copy a data CD image over so she could try a burn (or at least a test). The copy attempt resulted in a hang, so it looks like the culprit is not the kernel, per se, nor the CD burner, but the driver for the Promise IDE controller. (something to do with the driver getting confused or confusing the card when both the primary and secondary channels a re in use).

With that information, she was able to find a reference to the noapic kernel option. So now, booting a single-processor kernel, and specifying that option, you can use both channels on the Promise card.

I still haven't figured out this miso thing, but adding a bit of salt makes the broth a bit more drinkable. I suspect that adding some green onions, tofu, and seaweed would make it quite acceptable as miso soup.

As usual, I'm finding the book tough going because it starts out with the very most basic basics (and is, therefore, less than wholly engaging). For example, the authors talk about creating new lines by defining a new_line function as

   def new_line():
      print

and doing three new lines by defining a new function

   def threeLines():
      new_line
      new_line
      new_line

Then they go on to ask me, the reader, to think about how I could do nine blank lines the same way, and then wonder about 27 lines.

My response was to define a new function

   def new_line(lines):
      while (lines > 0):
	 print
	 lines = lines–1

and call it as new_line(27). So there!

After assorted fiddling, M has been able to burn a CD successfully. Hurray! Now all we have to do is figure out how to be able to do it without having to boot into a special state every time....

Funny line from The Fifth Elephant:

The crowd watched silently. If it was funny, clowns wouldn't be doing it.

Douglas Adams has died of a heart attack. I haven't thought about him for a while, but I was thrilled to discover that he was supposed to speak at Harvey Mudd College's commencement ceremony. Tomorrow.

After some Perl wizardry courtesy of M, my whole site should be valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. Finally.

One of the fascinating things about living in Vancouver is the way that the west is treated by Canadian television networks and cable stations.

In the States, both coasts are roughly equal in importance (the midwest is the ignored region). In Canada, though, the world revolves around Toronto (and Quebec), and lots of cable channels not only don't have Pacific time zone feeds, but ignore western audiences almost completely.

That leads to some bizarre programming, such as commercials for shops and restaurants that can only be found in Ontario (or maybe Quebec)—Life is a prime example here. The History Channel assumes that midnight EST is “tomorrow” everywhere they're seen, resulting in promos for shows airing at “9 PM today” showing at 9 PM Pacific time the night before.

It also leads to commercials for Canadian Club and Crown Royal (whiskeys) airing at 6 PM our time, during a show aimed primarily at teenagers (Roswell). I'm amazed by seeing hard liquor ads on television in the first place (I haven't seen enough TV in the States over the last few years to know if those ads air there now, too), but I'm especially amazed that they'd be shown during programming aimed at people who aren't even allowed to legally drink beer.

Dover Books finally has a website! The site looks a lot like Amazon's. I found it by looking to see if George Bickham's The Universal Penman (1741) might be available in some format. Bickham's book was mentioned in Georges Jean's Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts (Harry M. Abrams, 1992), a book my brother and sister-in-law gave us for Christmas.

If you're interested in recapturing the cursive handwriting you were taught in school, abcteach.com has a section on D'Nealian style handwriting, complete with examples to download. There's lots of other fun stuff there, too (graphics for worksheets, classroom decorations, and so forth).

Ever wonder how to pronounce “Magdalen College”? (“Maudlin”.) How to report a broken streetlamp (in Oxford)? How to filter your e-mail? Count the number of words in a LaTeX document? What kind of lights you need to have on your bicycle to ride legally at night? Whether you can end a sentence with a preposition? Whether Scottish pound notes are legal tender? Where to give blood?

These questions and many more are answered in the Oxford ox.FAQ file.

Our Internet connectivity has been flaky since yesterday. Combine that with a storm that made the lights flicker, and I haven't been spending much time with my computer over the last few days.

Instead, I've been reading Declare, which is good. I'm not sure if it will be in my top five list of Powers books yet (top two are The Stress of Her Regard and The Anubis Gates, with the Last Call/Expiration Date/Earthquake Weather trilogy close behind), but it's definitely holding my attention.

While looking into a bug report I made the other day, I came across the lincity and lincity-x packages. LinCity, it turns out, is a free SimCity-like game. Alas, like SimCity, it's horribly addictive. Sit down in front of it, and time passes in a flash. I'm not exactly sure, but I think I spent four to six hours playing it today. I removed it from my system. That's also why I never got around to buying SimCity for MacOS, and why I avoid any other similar games (Black & White would probably fall into the same category, if it were available for an OS I'd run in the first place).

B.C. is the proud (?) owner of a new right-wing government. Not that anyone is remotely surprised, but it's hard to understand what the NDP was thinking calling an election with not only a nurses' strike but a bus drivers' strike they've shown very little interest in settling. I wonder if there's something really awful about to happen that they'd prefer the Liberals take the blame for.

The season finale of The West Wing had some surprisingly powerful moments. The scene in the National Cathedral (which is an imposing place, except for the fact that most of the stones have the names of the people who “bought” them carved into them) was impressive—not only do we see a president speak Latin off-the-cuff, but he's challenging God openly—very apropos a conversation I had with M earlier today relating to the Book of Job (which is the source for an important quote in Declare: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.” (Job 38:4).

I also really like the way that flashbacks are used in The West Wing. Not just the way they're edited, although that's impressive, too, but the way that they fill us in about important events that really shaped the characters. I had always thought that Mrs. Landingham had worked for Bartlet when he was governor of New Hampshire, but it turns out she'd had a profound effect on him far sooner. We also got to see his bastard father in action, giving us some insight into why he's as driven as he is. The flashbacks featuring Josh and Sam's recruitment into the campaign (in a different episode, of course) were also excellent. We need more shows like The West Wing—smart, well-written, and hopeful. Goddess knows we can't look to the real White House for that kind of respect and power.

I spent most of today actually working! I filed some bugs against Debian packages, sent additional information to some other bugs (both ones I'd filed and some others had filed), helped out the guy who runs the m68k autobuilder with problems with one of my packages, reassigned a bug against one of my packages to another package, and built and uploaded a newer (Debian) version of my thoughttracker package.

Today we ventured downtown in search of a Rotring core fountain pen and a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. As I wrote earlier, I've been messing around with my handwriting, and I decided it would be fun to have a fountain pen again. As my ArtPen died a terrible death (which, after investigation, appears to be my fault for not having made sure I'd cleaned it out first), I need a new one, and the core is deeply funky.

Unfortunately, the Vancouver Pen Shop didn't have any of the turquoise ones in stock. They did have the black and the silver pens, though, so I was able to try them out and see how they handled. They'll do. The shop is supposed to call me when they get the turquoise ones in, but they don't know when that will be. So much for that impulsive purchase.

We then checked out the new Canon Digital Elph S300, which is leading the pack of digital cameras we're considering. It takes good pictures, and it's tiny, which means that we'd be more likely to have it along when we needed it. I actually like the Canon PowerShot G1 and the Nikon CoolPix 995 better, but M is swayed by the size argument. (To be fair, I've kind of wanted an Elph ever since I saw one in a drugstore in Sun Valley, Idaho—I've always loved tiny electronic things.) [Note that both the Canon and Nikon sites love to open pop-up windows.]

On to Granville Book Company, in search of Rudyard Kipling's Kim. Apparently Kim Philby, notorious British spy, was named after the main character in Kipling's novel. Powers quotes liberally from Kim in his chapter headings. Alas, Granville Book struck out, but we ended up with a copy of Douglas Coupland's City of Glass, a book of photographs of Vancouver with commentary from Coupland (who's a resident). City will have a practical use for us, as well: we can hand it to people who ask stupid questions such as, “Vancouver? Must get a lot of snow up there!”

Anyway, back, once again, to Chapters (Evil Chapters), where we spent some time comparing the merits of four different editions of Kim. (One Wordsworth (CN$3.99), one Oxford University Press (CN$7.95), and two Penguins (one CN$7.99 and one CN$9.99).) In the end, we ended up going with the OUP edition. My OUP A Tale of Two Cities has wonderful notes and introductory material, and the only thing against the OUP edition was its ragged typesetting. (It looks like they took an older edition, shot plates directly from the bound book, and printed 'em up.)

After that, we walked to Chinatown, which was swarming with tourists and shoppers clustered around the Chinese food shops (bins of shredded fish and meat, dried fish, chickens and pigs hung in windows, strange non-Western vegetables, etc.). We made a feeble foray into one shop with Japanese toys, but left unsatisfied. On the way back, we ventured into Dr. Sun Yat Sen's Chinese Park, which we'd never been in (it's the Garden that costs money, it turns out), and then stopped off at the T&T in International Village (a high-rise apartment complex), where we marveled at wacky imported foods.

Then back to downtown, a brief stop in A&B Sound, then to the car and home.

Baked brownies from scratch. Yum.

Victoria Day

I just lost a lot of respect for Roger Ebert, who has come out in support of the Cartoon Network's decision to drop “offensive” Bugs Bunny cartoons from its “retrospective”. Roger is under the impression that these cartoons could damage children and hurt people's feelings. Never mind that these cartoons were supposed to be shown late at night, surrounded by warnings. Never mind that the real reason for dropping them—as stated by Time-Warner-AOL executives—is to avoid pissing off the masses who buy Warner Bros.-branded products and not out of any concern for people's feelings.

Banning these images gives them power they don't deserve. Why not show them, and include some commentary before and after that talks about the origins of the stereotypes and explains how things have changed? Why not offer parents an opportunity to talk to their kids about these important topics? Because it damages the brand, and the brand is all.

We saw The Tailor of Panama, which was interesting. There was something weird about the way the film looked that I have to believe was deliberate. On the other hand, it was great to see Pierce Brosnan playing a real bastard for a change. He was perfect for the part.

Before I finally got my hands on Declare, I was getting a bit desperate, and seriously contemplated reading The Lord of the Rings. Like everybody else (well, everybody else I knew), I had a whole bunch of Tolkien books when I was a kid. I managed to read The Hobbit a couple of times, along with The Tolkien Reader and Smith of Wooton Major, but I was never able to get more than about a third of the way into the first book of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring.

As it happens, I'm not the only one to question Tolkien's relevance. While some trumpet him as the most influential writer of the twentieth century, others condemn his prose style as “archaic”, his politics as “reactionary”, and his work as a whole as distinctly un-Modern.
Via Virulent Memes

Hmm. My bag (my bag), which I've had for something like seven years, surprised me yesterday when it suddenly dropped to the ground. I was walking toward the bulk section in the grocery store, hoping to find plain unsugared ice tea mix (here in Canada, “ice tea” generally means Snapple or sugary Nestea—they warn you if you order ice tea in a restaurant and it isn't loaded with sugar). I felt a tug at my shoulder, and heard a soft bang. I stopped, looked around, and saw my bag on the floor.

It turns out that after seven years, the threads holding the strap to one side of the bag had given out. I never noticed any warning signs. Now I have to find another bag (assuming I have one—lots of my stuff is still in Seattle), and arrange to have this one taken apart and put back together again.

Not that exciting, I know, but it's pretty much the most exciting thing that happened to me yesterday.

Judith Donath's “Being Real”, an article of interest in light of the whole Kaycee thing.

I think anyone who's been online for any length of time, especially if they've spent time on IRC or some other chat forum, has come across people who may or may not have been robots. The sad thing is, an awful lot of the “people” you talk to online who seem like robots really are people after all....
Via CamWorld.

Peripherally related, according to this purity test, I am 31.0% online pure (or 69.0% online corrupt), thanks to spending several years post-graduation “living” on the 'Net. If I'd ever heard of some of the people and things mentioned on the test that were UK-specific, or had to pay for my 'Net access for much of that time, I'd be even worse off.

Still, I think I survived fairly well—I made some good friends, got through a really nasty period of my life, managed to find work, and am now once again capable of looking down my nose at computers and contemplating spending time improving my handwriting and reading classics. ;-)
Via the Null Device.

I spent some time last week working on cleaning up and checking in the various components of this website. I use HTML::Mason, a Perl module running under Apache as the main engine, with a whole slew of components that take the place of various features I got used to from using Frontier. The blog component and archives are built using a Perl script that chews through a hierarchical directory structure (standing in for a real database), and spits out files that are shaped by other Mason components.

The site you see is the result of yanking out completed HTML pages using wget and magicking them to eskimo with rsync.

This has been a bulletin from the Infrastructure Illumination Division.

Spent all day going through bug reports against various Debian teTeX packages.

The Guardian has one of the best articles I've seen about the scientific journal boycott. Among other things, it makes a very clear statement about the costs involved in publishing a scientific journal:

As a rule, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their colleagues who peer review them, nor the editorial boards who vet them, are paid. The publishers' costs are printing, the tiny full-time staff on each journal—typically two people—marketing, and distribution.

But journal prices are insane:

A year's subscription to Alcohol—nine issues—comes in at about £100 an issue. One Elsevier journal, Brain Research, costs more than £9,000 a year. Another, Preventative Veterinary Medicine, is now £713 a year, an increase of more than 300% over its 1991 price of £171.

I would love to work on a university-sponsored, peer-reviewed journal. The only reason we haven't seen any yet is that it's been seen as easier to let other people do the work. Maybe that attitude is finally changing.

Clearly I missed the boat on this job opportunity. No, wait—these people are evil....

The Republican party is getting nervous about its ability to maintain a national role. Seems that more and more people in the northeast and northwest—and the north, in general—are becoming more and more distrustful of the goals and ideals of the party, which has moved sharply toward being controlled by Southern white men adhering to a fundamentalist Christian ideology. Like that wasn't pretty obvious.

A great op-ed piece by James Carville and Paul Begala tells it like it is: Bush is a radical, bent on undoing decades of pro-people reform in the Federal Government, damaging the environment for corporate profit, and awarding massive tax cuts to the rich while continuing to screw the poor and middle class. Democrats need to wake up; call a spade a spade; fight back by pushing to spend the “surplus” on paying down the debt and improving services (education, health care); and obstruct the Republicans' moves to appoint radical right-wing judges, passing of legislation that undoes existing programs and harms the environment, and works for large corporations and against ordinary people. The only sad thing is that this program needed to be spelled out in the first place.

These links, and many more that I couldn't bring myself to follow, can be found in the latest message from the Red Rock Eater mailing list list.

Roger Ebert has a devastatingly funny review of Pearl Harbor, a film I was deriding just based on the early commercials.

"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialogue, it will not be because you admire them.

Given its utter lack of historical verisimilitude, you won't be surprised that the film had one of the highest grossing openings of all time. I am so looking forward to living in the States again. Sigh.

Salon figures out that X-10 is cool. We use some X-10 stuff to control a light in our living room and two bright halogen torchieres as a “dawn simulator” in the bedroom. (Sadly, they don't seem to really be helping us wake up any earlier.)

After some searching, I discovered that the Morrow edition of Tim Powers' Declare is set in ITC Berkeley Oldstyle. The giveaway is the amazing italic capital “Q”.

While thinking about type, and poking around with Google, I came across a column by Dan Margulis that originally appeared in the December, 1999, issue of Electronic Publishing that I really enjoyed reading. Margulis sums up the millennium from the perspective of graphic design, typography, and publishing. It's a PDF file, but I think that others may find “The Age of the Enlightened” interesting reading, as well.

[He also has nice things to say about Adobe's Kepler, which is our “house face”. I usually pair it with Cronos; M prefers Myriad.]

We took my bag in for repair, along with a pair of boots I'd had in my closet for the last couple of years. While at the Lougheed Mall, we discovered a large spread of books—remaindered or damaged—at significant discounts. I ended up with a copy of Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, which has been on my mental “acquire someday” list for around twelve years. Sadly, the only two copies of T.H. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom were too beat up for me; it would have been interesting reading as background material to Declare.

Jeff Veen talks about the importance of stalking your user when designing web applications. In other words, user-centered design, which is the best way to build things.

We took the plunge and bought a Canon PowerShot S300 Digital Elph. It's a really nice camera, and it's incredibly tiny. M spent a bunch of time looking online, and then called several places. It turned out that the places with the best prices were selling grey market cameras (no warranty), or charged huge amounts for shipping, or had some other nasty hidden costs. In the end, the difference between buying it locally and having it in our hands now and ordering it from someplace and having to wait to have it shipped and make it through the border amounted to about CN$60 for the camera alone, even with 14% sales tax (as opposed to the 7% border fees). When we found out we could get an extra battery for CN$70, that clinched the deal (as the lowest price M found for the battery in the States was US$70; about CN$108).

We still have to get a larger compact flash card—8 MB is kind of a joke with one of these things—and figure out a way to get images from the camera into a computer (we can see them on TV, though!), but at least we (especially me) can spend a bit of time practicing so that we (I) can get some photos at M's graduation ceremony.

After wrestling with various mailorder sites, we discovered that MicroConcept had really good prices on Compact Flash cards that work in our shiny new camera—~CN$135 for a 128 MB! So we dashed out just before six, dodged through Vancouver's horrible traffic, found a place to park a block ahead of the store, and dashed in five minutes before closing. The card works great—at highest resolution and standard compression, we can get 401 images on that one card. The mind boggles. The camera now has more RAM than any of our computers.