Blog: Archive for June, 2001

FreakyLinks!!!

One of your last opportunities to catch an episode of FreakyLinks comes tonight at nine on Fox as they show the remaining few episodes.

I know, I know, FreakyLinks is cheesy and lame, but I thought it improved dramatically. It has some nice underlying creepiness that hasn't been explained too thoroughly (cf., the whole UFO thing in The X-Files), the people are cute and enthusiastic (if not that bright), and the show has real computers. And, hey, compare it to The Lone Gunmen. I don't think there's any doubt which one's better.

In other TV news, please continue to stay away from C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigators. Although it has William Petersen, who was great in Manhunter (Michael Mann's take on Thomas Harris's Red Dragon—and let me just say that Brian Cox's Hannibal Lector kicks Anthony Hopkins' ass), and two veterans of E.R., including Carter's almost-girlfriend from several seasons ago, Maggie Doyle, it has some of the crappiest writing on television. I think the producers must have seen an episode of Quincy, M.E. (the all-time champ), and maybe an episode of Snoops (another failed David E. Kelley show). They certainly don't seem to have watched Law & Order, Adam 12, or even Barney Miller. Anyway, suffice it to say that the show is awful, and the previous episode was not a fluke.

Some idiot (who happens to be an international graduate student) sent an “anonymous” message via Hotmail to an SFU mailing list complaining about these damn workers in Canada thinking they have a right to strike, and calling for them to all be fired so “poor, unemployed immigrants” could take their jobs. Now, yes, the bus strike has gone on far too long, but it's more due to the bus drivers refusing to allow their union to be broken up by management outsourcing their jobs one-by-one than anything else. The NDP government also had no apparent interest in solving the strike, and anyone who voted for the Liberals in hopes that they'd fix things was a fool. (Remember: in Canada, everything is upside down. The Liberals are a right-wing party.)

Besides, it's pretty tough to be a “poor, unemployed immigrant” here unless you're fleeing oppression back home. Trust me, you don't get to immigrate to Canada unless you've got a job lined up or family that can support you already here, and even then Immigration Canada and HRDC might sandbag you.

So M responded to the guy, quoting him and calling him by his real name. It's easy, kids: Hotmail records the IP address you connect with in every message. M traced the address to one of the SFU dialup lines. You can see who's logged on via the dialups, and what IP address is assigned to them, along with (here's the kicker!) what time they signed on. Since the guy had signed on at 9:30, and the message was sent at 10:00, and he was still on when she checked, it was pretty obvious who'd sent the mail. Various folks at SFU are amused and embarrassed today.

My beloved TurboMouse stopped moving the cursor down today. If I got it down to the bottom of the screen (with a second mouse), I could go up, but never down.

In the end, I took it apart, and discovered a whole bunch of fuzz clinging to the little wheels. Best guess: there was a bit of fuzz that would be pushed away from the sensor when moving the mouse up, but that would be pulled in front of the sensor when trying to move down.

There's very little to the guts of the trackball—a single circuit board with one big chip, a few resistors and other bits, and two wheel/sensor units—one for horizontal and one for vertical movement. While I had the thing apart, I cleaned it out, polished the wheels, and blew out any extra dust that might have been hiding. Put it back together, rebooted, and everything's fine. I love that trackball.

Tomorrow is Hats Off Day in Burnaby Heights again! It's usually fun—a parade with kids, and cops on motorcycles doing tricks, SFU's famous bagpipe band, lots of places selling sausage sandwiches, plus salmon on a stick and much, much more!

If you're nearby, and it isn't pouring with rain, come check it out!

Hats Off Day went pretty well, although it got off to a damp start. It rained quite hard during the beginning of the parade, causing the police (Seattle & Vancouver) motorcycle teams to totally wuss out, just driving down the street in formation.

Soon after, though, the rain slackened, and the parade got underway. Lots of unusual groups of people, often not quite identifiable as signs seemed to be optional. By the time the parade ended and the crowds were released to throng the street, the rain had stopped and the sun started to come out. The salmon-on-a-stick from the Pear Tree was excellent as ever, and sausage sandwiches abounded.

We walked about for a while, then headed home before hitting London Drugs for a partial refund on our camera, which we'd found for even less than we paid. In the end, the camera was “only” CN$810 (plus PST/GST), making it about as good a deal as we could have gotten from the States.

One more story from Friday: We were getting ready to go out (we got our hair cut) when someone knocked on our door. It turned out to be a guy from UPS, with a package for M from HMC, with CN$35 owing for duty and brokerage fees. The duty was about CN$3—the rest went to UPS. Inside was a really nice sweatshirt and a card signed by the folks from the department. Clearly it was meant as a gift, but because they naively used UPS Ground, it ended up costing M about half what it probably cost to buy. The lesson here is to never, ever use UPS to send stuff to people in Canada from the States, or vice versa. And never be fool enough to order anything shipped by them.

You see, UPS figured out that they could make a huge amount of money by charging for their customs brokerage services. FedEx doesn't do that. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service don't do that. But UPS does. You can avoid forcing your recipient to pay that charge by paying for UPS express delivery instead. If you look carefully at the numbers, you'll find that UPS express delivery costs just as much as UPS ground, except that the brokerage fee is added in.

Even better, don't use UPS. Don't do business with people who only ship UPS. Explain, in exquisite detail, why UPS sucks, and why you won't do business with them. If they won't make an exception for you, shop elsewhere.

This has been a message from the Hidden Postal Rates Awareness Committee.

More TV tips: ABC is showing Harriet the Spy tonight at 7:00 PM. I loved this book when I was a kid, and read it to death (it's one of the few books I had that literally fell apart). I have some hopes for the movie version—it stars Michelle Trachtenberg, who was wonderful as Dawn thoughout the just-ended season of Buffy.

Also, on A&E, there's another Nero Wolfe mystery. I read lots of these when I was a kid, borrowing them from the library, and as far as I can tell, the show is very true to the source material. The shows look great, too, capturing the look, feel, and sound of the early fifties as I imagined it from the books. The acting is good, too—Timothy Hutton, who plays Archie Goodwin, is also a director and executive producer, so he's got an investment to protect.

There are some things that make me feel like I've completely wasted my life—missed an opportunity to really do something worthwhile and fulfilling. One of those things is watching a craftsman at work. Programs such as Modern Masters and Martha Stewart Living show people who do amazing things, and clearly love doing that work.

I occasionally wonder whether I should try to find someone to apprentice myself to, or maybe just try to figure out how to do some obscure craft on my own, and give up on these bloody computers. But it will probably never happen.

M is working on making Adobe Jenson MM work with TeX. Getting the basics was easy, but Jenson includes a bunch of old-fashioned ligatures (such as the ct, ft, and st ligatures), as well as those wonderful long-Ses you'll remember from reproductions of seventeenth and eighteenth century documents.

Anyway, looking for an example to use to determine what the rules were for the use of the long-Ses reminded me that we had Milton's Aeropagitica (1644), from a company called Octavo. Octavo sells CD-ROM versions of various famous books, photographing them and turning the images into PDF, then adding the text beneath to make them searchable and quotable (via copy & paste). The Aeropagitica CD-ROM was part of a package of premiums that Salon sent out when they were first starting, and first asked for people to “join”. (The others were a T-shirt, two bookmarks, and a small notebook.)

Octavo also has some Shakespeare editions, along with Bodoni's Manuale Tipografico, Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Gallileo's Sidereus Nuncius, Palladio's I Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, and many more.

Fun work:

• Updated the teTeX manpages I wrote with some new information about authorship
• Fixed the script that generates this blog so that it
  • Sets permissions properly (so that the annoying error messages from Mason that some of you may have seen earlier today should never happen again)
  • Fixed the archive subroutine so that entries appear in date order, rather than reverse date order

I sent my mom a really cool birthday card from Rabbits of the Rainbow. I even sent it a week early. But she still hasn't gotten it. Canada Post truly sucks.

Lame teachers object to gel pens:

“Males were covering their fingernails with ink. Writing their rapper names on themselves. Girls were writing their best friends' names on their arms, writing which boys they like, which bands they like,” said Lynnette Moore, an eighth-grade math teacher.

As we all know, regular pens can't be used to do those things. Regular pens also don't leak. And they allow elementary school students to complete art projects with the brushwork of a Da Vinci or Rembrandt. Yeah.
Via Red Rock Eater mailing list.

M was convocated today! Complete with squashy hat and scarlet robe! Pictures to come (we filled a whole 128 MB Compact Flash card!), perhaps....

Saw the new iBook, at last. Pretty neat. Nice screen, okay keyboard (although it still has those huge keys—what's up with that?). Maybe a good bet down the road, but I'm still reading enough about teething pains on Macintouch to make me willing to wait. I'm also eager to hear about any changes in Apple's line up post-MacWorld before getting too wedded to any one plan.

Another creak of the wheel: Someone from the moving company will be coming next Wednesday to take a look at our apartment and give us (or HMC, anyway) an estimate on the costs to move us, as well as briefing us on the intricate bureaucratic rituals that must be performed to bless the passage of our goods into the United States.

Wow! Airships rise again! See also the Slashdot article, and the official CargoLifter site. I love airships, but it seems like every few years we have a new company spring up and announce that airships will save the world, complete with documentaries explaining the history of airships, their promise, and how this time things will be different. Then you never hear about the company again.

While delivering fully assembled fast-food restaurants to third world countries doesn't seem like a very noble use—“We're live! From the new Taco Bell at the epicenter of the most devastating earthquake to hit Mexico in recorded history!”—any reason to have airships floating around seems like a good one to me. They're too cool not to have, and if we want to keep pretending we're moving toward The Future, we need 'em. (The Future according to 1930s speculative fiction, anyway.)
Via Slashdot.

I found this report on LED flashlights really interesting, and fun to read, as well.

Also of some interest, perhaps, is this review of USB flash RAM devices. I've wondered about getting something like one of these devices to store various important information on—crypto keys, password lists, pictures of my sweetie, my résumé, and so forth.

Whoops. Cameron pointed to a funny essay on Jamie's site, and I ended up spending hours poking around reading other essays.

Ikea seems to have a new site that challenges HP for slowness and general unusability. It's loaded with ASP pages that take forever to load and don't look quite right when they do. Given that I have DSL here, I don't think it should really take five minutes to load a page.

Edmund Scientific's site is also crappy, but in a low-tech way. It wants you to make choices from a list of top-level categories, which are pretty general, then from a list of slightly less general categories, and so on. Which would be fine if I had the paper catalog and knew roughly what was in each category and subcategory, but it's really not conducive to browsing through their whole catalog online.

Oh, yeah, and the categories are pretty obscure. For example,

Navigation : Other Navigational Tools–Sunglasses
Unique Lighting: Unique Lighting : LAVA Motion Lamp: Red Lava in Yellow Fluid

Yeesh.

As much as I despise Ziff-Davis, this essay, by Joshua Bauchner, does a good job of summarizing today's state of the art in copyright, and why it's wrong.
Via the null device.

M has pictures on her site of Hats Off Day (taken by her) and her convocation (mostly taken by me).

Today we cashed in our vast number of Save-on-More points for a blender. It's apparently a Canada-only model, featuring a glass jug marked in ounces, cups, and litres and exciting French labels on the controls!

We also spent much too long shifting piles of books around on a remainder table, coming up with a collection of wacky Dover books:

• The Psychology of Visual Illusion, J.O. Robinson
• Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, Rudolf v. B. Rucker
• One Hundred Problems in Elementary Mathematics, Hugo Steinhaus
• Topology: An Introduction with Application to Topological Groups, George McCarty
• The Art of Rigging, Captain George Biddlecombe

That's US$45 worth of books for CN$10!

(If you were wondering, they're all M's, primarily, except for The Art of Rigging, which I just thought looked neat. (The next time I read a book about pirates, I can check to see if the author got his rigging right!))

Oh, yes, we also bought some food, including some vanilla ice cream so we could try out our new blender. (Combine with some milk and the bananas we bought last weekend and viola!—yummy banana milkshakes!)

An additional food tip: Adding Rice Krispies to ice cream (especially Breyer's banana chocolate chunk ice cream) adds crunch and general pleasantness!

No one who knows me will be in the least surprised to know that I fall firmly into the “libertarian left” quarter of the Political Compass.
Via Virulent Memes

Salon's Charles Taylor has a great rant starting from Marjorie Heins' Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth.

TidBITS has an interesting discussion about choosing between Apple's new iBook and PowerBook G4 (TiBook). Mike Whybark and I agree on most things—while the TiBook looks slightly cooler (they're all the rage with some of the computing science faculty up at SFU), the iBook is a better deal, especially if you have a solid desktop system for real work, and just use the iBook for roaming/take home stuff.

Suddenly everything makes more sense: “Unhappy people `make the best workers”'. Still, I doubt my managers knew that then....
Via the null device.

Hmm...

Residents and critics have long described the bombings as a health threat, but the Navy says its bombs are not dangerous, and that the range is vital for national security.

Naval bombs aren't dangerous? What about those nukes, then? Maybe they're safe, and the whole Cold War was a misunderstanding? Yeesh.
Via Rebecca's Pocket.

M laughingly read aloud from this Register article about a former Republican senator's wife, who foolishly believed she could use HotMail to slander her husband's opponent and get away with it. Too bad for her she was caught by the same method M used to expose an anti-union poster recently. Also too bad for her that her messages violated a state election law (in Minnesota), and she'll be paying some pathetically tiny fines.

Oh, and if tracing her via her IP address wasn't easy enough, some of her messages also included Microsoft Word attachments that included her name and the names of other staffers embedded in the document.

Remember, kids: HotMail and Microsoft don't do anonymous!

A track-by-track review of New Order's forthcoming album, Get Ready. I still love New Order—not only do the albums released when I was younger still speak to me, but the newer ones do, as well. I hope that's true for this one, too.

I know some people who think that bands should just pack it in once they start to get old. But I think that—when things work out just right—having a band stick around can be a good thing. The people in the band change as they get older and experience life, and if their experiences mirror or complement yours, their music can affect you as much as it did when you were all young. It's great to be able to listen to a song that came out when you were a teenager, and remember what that was like, and then listen to a song that came out when you were thirty, and be able to feel like that song captures some of your feelings, hopes, and dreams at that time of your life.
Via the null device.

“Three Myths of XML” addresses some of the bizarre hype surrounding XML, which is, after all, just a way of formatting data, not a miraculous cure for all that ails the world.

Looking just at documents, I have to say that while I appreciate the idea of splitting content from appearance, in practice SGML and XML (via something like DocBook or DebianDoc) just don't cut the mustard. For electronic access, they're fine—browsers aren't typographically sophisticated enough to be able to display text that is particularly well formatted, and there's no real expectation of quality when using such a tool. When it comes to printing, though, people do expect that things will be done right, and the current method of transforming documents from SGML to paper misses the boat on all too many of those criteria.

When you combine the poor rendering tools with the incredibly horrible or nonexistent authoring tools, you can see why I choose LaTeX when I need to create a document. I define lots of commands so that I can do some level of structural markup, but I also maintain tight control over the final appearance of the document. Maybe some day it will be possible to write a document in SGML or XML and get high-quality output without having to spend hours tinkering with some intermediate form (usually TeX or LaTeX code, at this point), but until that day comes, I think I'll stick with LaTeX.
Via CamWorld.

Nature has commentary from lots of people about the debate surrounding electronic access to primary scientific literature, a topic I find very interesting, especially since I can see an interesting and rewarding job there for me.

One of the arguments against the idea that I see repeatedly is the claim that peer-review will somehow go out the window without a professional publisher riding heard on an editorial board of volunteer academics. Why? How can anyone seriously believe that a group of experts can't coalesce on its own, or with a little help from one or two knowledgeable folks who can recruit volunteers directly or point out good candidates.

I'm not convinced that any journals launched under this banner have to be free in the monetary sense, either. Simply charging reasonable subscription fees (covering the costs of production) would be a dramatic enough change. Having electronic versions is important from the perspective of granting access and searchability, but paper is still likely to be easier to read and refer to than articles in electronic form for some time.

My views are bound to be a bit skewed, since the work I'm most familiar with these days comes from people working in computer science and mathematics, probably the most computer- and web-savvy groups around. It's already the case that a huge amount of research is available on the Web though the personal websites of individual scientists, collections of “technical reports” at various institutions, and relatively inexpensive subscription services (e.g., the ACM's Digital Library). Services such as ResearchIndex provide indexes of these papers, and often include quick links to download the original PDF or PostScript document.

There's no reason that scientists in other fields couldn't do the same. Without going so far as to exhort the magical possibilities of the Internet, it seems obvious to me that any significant improvement in access to information could lead to new cross-disciplinary discoveries or other advances. One scientist's curious result could be another's miraculous solution. Why not give it a try?
Via Slashdot.

M and I went for a walk to see if we could get a passport-style photo for her visa application and some bread for dinner. Since we were already out, and the sun was shining brightly, and there was a slight breeze so it wasn't that hot, we decided to walk down to the office supply superstores and see about getting some more photo paper for our inkjet printer.

On the way, M expressed some doubts about leaving Vancouver. I countered by pointing out that however nice Vancouver is, there are still some awful things about it that we won't miss. She demanded examples, and I suggested (1) the drivers, (2) the Canadian government, and (3) the B.C. government. She pointed out that you could say much the same about California, and I agreed completely. We ended by deciding that anywhere you could go would have some positive things that made it better than anywhere else, and some negative things that were worse than anywhere else. The key is balance.

On the way back home, we noticed some confusion at an intersection a couple of blocks away. As got closer, we could see that the intersection was blocked. Closer still, and we could tell it was an accident. Still closer, and, gosh! There was a minivan on its side, with a smaller minivan stopped in the middle of the intersection with its hood up and airbag deployed.

We took pictures while speculating on the cause, which was, almost certainly, the following: Two roads intersected at right angles. One road was a through road, with no stop signs. The other road had stop signs. What had happened was that the overturned minivan had either run their stop sign (which is standard practice here) or had somehow missed the oncoming minivan and pulled out in front of it. There's a fair chance the minivan with the right of way was speeding, too, just so we're not being totally biased.

The most amazing thing about this accident is that it's really the first one of its kind that we've seen. I'm guessing that there are lots more, but most people don't actually flip their vehicles, so can avoid calling the police.

A somewhat amusing review of Ian Stewart's Flatterland, a followup to Edwin Abbott's classic Flatland.

“Don't worry.” The cube had returned. “We'll put him back again. Just decided to get a bit Lovecraft on his ass after all that business with the Kyoto accord, and the tax plan and everything. He seemed to lack ...” The cube might've been chuckling. “Perspective.”

Exciting new versions of mminstance and t1utils will appear in Debian unstable within the next couple of days. The main change in mminstance is that it can now be compiled with newfangled compilers, such as gcc 3.0, which was released today. The new t1utils package fixes problems with calculating the CRC for the Mac font tools.

It's computer cleanup time today, as well. I finally got around to figuring out why several of my function keys haven't worked since switching to XFree 4 (no keysyms). It also turns out that my machine's extreme sluggishness was being caused by a lack of swap space. Everything was fine until I upgraded to XFree 4, which grabs considerably more memory, a few months ago. Hmph.

Hmm. Adding more swap seemed to help, but not as much as I think we were hoping. Apparently it's too much to ask that you be able to edit files, work in terminal windows, and browse the web on a machine with a mere 80 MB of RAM with Linux these days. Color me unimpressed.

On the bright side, my pen has apparently come in at the Vancouver Pen Shop, so I can pick it up tomorrow while M is talking to the folks at the consulate. Wish her luck—we need something to work soon if we're ever going to get down to California in time for the start of the semester....

What an exciting day!

It all started when we were awakened by M's ancient but still functional Psion organizer at 6:25 AM. I had set the main alarm for 6:00 PM. Whoops.

Anyway, we struggled to consciousness, gulped down Instant Breakfast, and drove off for M's nine o'clock visa appointment. We parked in the nicest parkade in Vancouver (beneath BCIT—it has the most wonderfully friendly signage in Officina Sans), and set off on foot to find the Consulate, which turned out to be in an ugly gold-glass office building complete with a Starbucks at the base.

I couldn't go in, of course, so M got in line, and I wandered away to find something to amuse myself with for an indeterminate period of time. I ended up in a small park overlooking the Burrard Inlet, with a good view of the floating gas station, seaplanes landing and taking off, moored freighters and tugs, and docked luxury cruise ships. Along with a slice of Stanley Park and a glimpse of the sulfur piles.

I ended up taking a bunch of photographs, including a panorama that features all of the above. I also took some individual photographs of various mountain peaks, a 'plane landing, and so forth. Then I wandered around some more, taking pictures of other random items that looked interesting enough to be worth the trouble.

Despite what seemed like hours passing, only about forty-five minutes had gone by before I ended up near the Consulate again. I walked by a Herman Miller store, and peeked in the windows. Finally I ended up back in the park between the consulate and the Herman Miller store, where I sat and waited. (I was hoping to get a shot of the empty concrete wasteland along with the “No Skateboarding” sign, but wasn't able to get an angle.)

Suddenly, M appeared! She was done already, and had a sticker telling her to come back at three o'clock that afternoon to pick up her passport and visa. She told me about her experience (which sounded about par with our experience at the San Francisco Passport Agency Office (except with a lot more riding on it)), and we wandered down to the Vancouver Pen Shop, where I picked up my neat Rotring core pen, but discovered that my credit card had expired, when I'd never received a new one. Luckily I had M there, and she bailed me out.

We headed down to Kimprints in Gastown, where we bought more Rabbits of the Rainbow cards (my mom wanted some).

From there we went to London Drugs, where we inquired after the case for our Canon PowerShot S300 (they still don't have it), bought some water for much-needed rehydration, and played with a PowerMac G4 attached to a projector. Following a tip from the guy at the photo counter, we walked through the mall to check another photo store (which also didn't have the case); on the way we stopped in an IBM store to poke at various IBM desktops and ThinkPads.

Then we walked to Granville Island, which seems close to downtown, but is actually quite a ways away. It took nearly half an hour just to walk across the bridge!

We had lunch at the Public Market (turkey sandwich for me; sausage-on-a-bun for M), then checked out some of the shops. I saw a Bill Reid book in the window of Blackberry Books that screamed “Douglas & McIntyre”, especially with the note about it being edited and with an introduction by Robert Bringhurst: Solitary Raven: Selected Writings of Bill Reid. It turned out to be the only copy, and after having someone get it from the window so we could look at it, we ended up buying it. (Leaving aside its general coolness—various pieces Bill Reid wrote over the years, along with photographs of him and his work—at CN$40, it was considerably cheaper than the US$35 cover price.)

After popping into Paper-Ya (nothing exciting) and Mesa (who no longer had the earrings I'd seen just before Christmas), we headed back to downtown.

We picked up M's passport, complete with shiny new visa. I don't know what most places use for visas, but Canada's “immigration documents” seem to be letter-size sheets of elaborately decorated paper with information printed on them with a dot-matrix printer (based on the ones I've seen). The US, in contrast, puts a passport-sized, laser-printed sticker, complete with a scanned photograph of the holder, in the passport. Wild stuff.

Once we had the passport, we were done, and headed back to the car and drove home to recover from the heat.

M got in touch with the movers to let them know we would be moving sooner than later. I called Citibank to find out about my credit card—it had supposedly been “returned”. After some discussion, the woman I spoke to arranged to have a new card sent to me by UPS so I should have it by Friday.

Meanwhile, M has been looking into the cost of airline tickets so we can fly down to Claremont and find someplace to live. In her search, she came across the Airline Ticket Consolidators and Bucket Shops FAQ, which may be of some interest the next time you're planning a trip. Among other things, this FAQ will tell you why Priceline is a bad risk, what the IATA is and why it's evil (and how the airlines get around the agreement),

The IBM store I mentioned above had an 8 MB IBM-branded “Memory Key” like the ones I mentioned a couple of days ago. It turns out that these devices are actually made by M-Systems, and are also available in 16 and 32 MB versions (only available from Dell, however). I might get one of these once I have a machine with some USB ports.

Since I'm going to be flying soon, I thought I'd check into whether it would be safe to take my new fountain pen. The best source I found was the alt.collecting.pens-pencils Fountain Pen FAQ. It seems it should be fine, especially if I put it in a ziplock bag and keep it nib up.

Our packing material has arrived—there's tons of it! There are (no kidding):

• 5 wardrobe boxes (for hanging clothes)
• 10 6 cubic foot boxes (for quilts, pillows, and other lightweight stuff)
• 20 4 cubic foot boxes (for clothes and miscellaneous stuff)
• 50 2 cubic foot boxes (for books and other small, heavy stuff)
• 50 lbs. of 2' x 4' newsprint sheets

And we live in a small one-bedroom apartment. And that's not counting my stuff in Seattle (mostly books, and a stereo, all of which is already packed up). Or my stuff in New York (which, regrettably, still won't be joining us).

Broken down, the boxes take up about 72 cubic feet (4' x 6' x 3'). Taped up, they should absorb most of the scant free space we have. Yikes!

Up at 8 AM (after going to bed at 2) because I'm waiting for UPS to show up with my new credit card. Yuck.

Microsoft's most solid OS.
Via M, who saw a link on Red Hat's Seawolf list.

Various things have thrown our plan to fly down to California soon into chaos. We're still not sure what we're doing.

Graham, whose site doesn't work in the newest version of Netscape that runs on my machine (4.73), but which is generally worth the trouble of loading in Konqueror or Lynx, had a pointer to the results of a survey asking about the best flag in North America that was conducted by the North American Vexillological Association. New Mexico was the winner, and, after refreshing my extremely vague memory of what the flag looked like, I think it is coolly iconic in a way that most U.S. state flags aren't. It actually looks very corporate.

My favorite state flag, however, remains Maryland's. I was happy to see that it made it to #4. I suspect that it didn't do better, in part, because it would be very hard for people to draw without help. Still, I think it's one of the most active flags—it has verve, energy, vim, vigor!

I quite like British Columbia's flag, too, although more the sun than the Union Jack. The New York (where I grew up) and California (where I lived for several years and am moving back to) flags don't do much for me.

Zannah pointed to The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors. I sometimes think that editing two books was one of the worst things I ever could have done to myself. I've always been bothered by bad English, especially in print, but after concentrating on syntax and grammar and spelling for several months, I've become hypersensitive. I don't fly into a rage or anything, but I am constantly amazed and disappointed by the mistakes I see, especially when they come from people or places I admire.

The errors that annoy me the most lately are various incorrect uses of the dreaded apostrophe. Now, messing up “its” and “it's” is pretty sad—I mean, hey, it's one little rule. But for some reason an awful lot of people in the Lower Mainland seem to believe that plurals are formed by adding “ 's” to words. Even worse, some people seem to think that any word ending with an “S” should have an apostrophe. The very best (or worst?) example of this mistake was on a set of huge banners made for Save-on-Foods by Pepsi Canada, which stated that “Save-on-Foods Welcome's You”. I mean it.
Via /usr/bin/girl.

Things are looking up! Yesterday's panic and depression have been replaced by mild elation, as we found a good deal on airfare on Tuesday. Looks like we'll be driving down to Seattle this weekend, catching the 'plane down to Ontario on Tuesday, looking around for a week (and, hopefully, signing a lease and maybe getting some other bureaucratic stuff out of the way), and flying back to Seattle the following Tuesday. We'll either fail utterly after rushing around for a week or find a place that's perfect on the first day and have to amuse ourselves in Greater L.A. for a week. I'd prefer the latter, of course!

I am once again a member in good standing of our evil capitalist society. I have to say that my new card is pretty cool-looking—new “citi” logo, menacing Darth Vader color scheme, and all.

Nick Petreley on Microsoft's amazing co-option of network computing.
Via CamWorld.

I was, well, interested, but I think I'm too jaded to really have been horrified by this tale about a major mistake made by Coca-Cola, and their efforts to cover it up. Coca-Cola, it turns out, is the not friendly corporate giant they'd like you to think, but, among other things, a frequent collaborator with the CIA, a corrupter of lawyers, and, perhaps, a briber of judges.
Also via CamWorld.

An important meme to spread—the following code snippet will supposedly turn off Microsoft's “Smart Tags”, which can rewrite your Web pages to make selected words and phrases become links to sites they choose (or are paid to choose):

<meta name="MSSmart TagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

Unlike Dave Winer, I don't have a violent objection to the annotation services that allow people to attach the electronic equivalent of Post-It Notes to other people's Web pages. The number of people who would actually go to the trouble of finding, downloading, installing, and configuring the necessary plugin is going to be pretty small, and, frankly, as long as there's a clear distinction between what I've written and what other people have written about what I've written, I'm okay with it. (I'm even willing to entertain discussions via e-mail, and, if I felt it was appropriate, I'd quote stuff on my pages or link back to other people's pages. Check out the C.R.E.W. for another approach.)

But Smart Tags are clearly evil, for several reasons, including the fact that authors have no input into the links added; the option is likely to be turned on by default in Internet Explorer, which is unquestionably the market leader; the keywords and phrases that trigger the linking will, presumably, be sold to the highest bidder; and, last and least, it's Microsoft, and no one really trusts them not to do even worse things (tracking, maybe?) these days.

From where I sit, the worst aspect is that the Smart Tags links are indistinguishable from the original author's links. Thus my reference to Post-It Notes here and above could become links to 3M's website, and a reader would have no idea whether I'd made those links or Microsoft had inserted them in the page. (Hint: They shouldn't be links; I couldn't be bothered to give a free commercial plug to a product that's pretty much ubiquitous.)

The second worst aspect is that it's an opt-out system: in order to stop Microsoft from messing with your work, you have to add code to every single page on your site to tell the browser not to do its (black) magic.

Beyond a token objection on the Microsoft-is-evil™ front, I honestly think that I wouldn't have that much of a problem with Smart Tags provided that they made a very clear distinction between my links and Microsoft's links. Smart Tags would be even more acceptable if, instead of requiring people to opt-out, Microsoft required people who wanted their work messed with to add a tag that said, “Sure, go ahead and spatter ads throughout my page!”
Inspired by inessential.com.

We're still in Claremont. We've found a (smaller) one-bedroom apartment that's pretty close to campus, and are on the waiting list for a two-bedroom apartment in the same complex.

The people in the department are really nice, and have taken us to dinner and lunch, driven us around town, and offered tons of advice.

It's very hot here, but it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it has in Vancouver lately.

Not that it's news to anyone, but Microsoft's “Natural”, Apple's first generation iMac/G3, and Sun keyboards all suck. The Apple Cinema Display, however, is quite nice, although a bit difficult to read after a while (at least with Mac OS X).