What the fuck is going on in this town? First we have the two hostile crowd incidents in the past two weeks, followed by a shooting at Folklife, another on First Hill, and now one in Ravenna. At Cafe Racer, of all places!? Grief, I can't imagine a more laid-back, more friendly place than Cafe Racer-- that's where the Rubyists have their weekly Rails meetings on Monday nights and we all overload the WiFi and talk shop and I teach more about Coffeescript than I learn about Rails, all while eating great burgers with limp, greasy fries and awesome beer. What the Hell made someone just open up like that?

I hope it's just a statistical anomaly. But it's surely an upsetting statistical anomaly.

Tags: seattle
Current Mood: worried

It's funny how primed we are by our environment. Case in point: today, at random, my music player came around to the 'N', where I have an astonishing number of CDs from "Nature Sounds," which are just what they sound like: hours of high-quality microphonage from rainforests, oceans, desert winds and so forth.

And yet, listening to them, I get anxious... when is the music gonna start? Over the years, so many musical artists, from new age to metal, have started their albums with "natual sounds" that the sound of "Rain in the Country'"or "The Calm Sea" seems to natually be a precursor to music, and just listening to the sound itself requires some time for acclimation.

Tags: life, observation
Current Mood: annoyed

Can Alain de Botton even read?

I ask because this de Botton has out-parodied himself again by announcing that he was launching a porn website free of "stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation."

The real problem with current pornography is that it's so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.

Which is what leads me to the question, can Alain de Botton read? Because literary pornography is deeply embedded in questions about the world, about why people have sex, about awkward sex, about contexual sex, about great sex, about sensible, moral, kind and ambitious sex.

What have been doing for the past twenty years if not writing sex that marries the characters to their ethics, allows them to embrace their virtues even while having sex? Fuck me, if The Journal Entries didn't ultimately evolve into a pornography in which characters expressed, even during sex, their highest principles, then all of that writing has been for naught.

And I'm sure I'm not alone in that assessment.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: The Art of Noise, Beat Box/Close to the Edit (live)

It was a lovely, lovely weekend. A little busy, a little tiring. Friday afternoon I had, following on the heels of my 46th birthday, my 46th annual physical. I'm healthy. My doctor spotted my FitBit and said, "You're the second patient in a row. You guys are going to live forever." I like my physician and I'd like to keep her. She's unflappable. And, all in all, I'm much more healthy than most people my age. I can't complain.

Saturday was a gardening day. I dug out another bed and planted zucchini and squash, then weeded out about 2/3rds of the mint bed, which is a long, horribly overgrown patch I didn't watch closely enough last year. It doesn't help that my neighbor's land subsides against mine along that wall, so every year I have to dig out two or three inches of rising dirt and soil that have washed through the fence or it'll press up against the foundation. I ran Stormy and her friend home from a trip to the mall to see The Avengers, and Kouryou-chan had ballet. We ordered take-out Chinese for dinner, and I sadly spent four hours playing Mass Effect. (I say sadly because I only wanted to spend two hours, and then get some coding done.)

Sunday it rained. That was okay as we had the day booked full with chores and trips. The kitchen floor was in desperate need of a mopping. We went to Kouryou-chan's school for what was our last fundraiser with them. Omaha got recognized for her six years of work on maintaining the school grounds, and then she told me she's planning on joining the school board. "In your copious spare time," I pointed out.

Later, we went to our state senator's house, where she was proudly showing off a remodeling job and talking politics.

When we got home, I actually got some work done. I built a stock VM with sudo and ssh enabled, and then mass-produced VMs for all of my personal projects. I'm in the process of creating fab files for the basic tools I use (Django, Rails, Express, and PlayFramework) to take a VM to which you have ssh-and-sudo access and automatically install the framework with explicit dependencies fully mapped out. It'll be a nice toolkit for getting projects off the ground with a full testing suite ensite.

Today's expedition to Storm's high school for the parent/teacher conference was a complete waste of time. It was fifteen minutes long. The first ten minutes were a scripted set of bulletpoints that the school distributed to each student. The first instruction read, "The parent should remain silent and withhold all questions until the end of the presentation."

So, I did.

After which, I said, "This was a complete waste of time. There's nothing here that I don't know about. We keep close track of Storm's performance, ask about her homework, and about her ambitions." I pointed to the four years plan she had asked Storm to develop. "Storm and I wrote put that together a month ago after a meeting with the IB instructor. If anything, the scripted nature of this presentation seems designed to prevent me from asking you anything pointed or direct."

The teacher spread her hands defensively. "You'd be surprised how many parents come in here and learn something new, something they didn't know about their student." She then turned back to Storm to work through a list of questions she had about Storm's progress. Toward the end, she said, "Many parents don't really have a good grasp on education at the high school level."

"Storm lives a father who's a published author and software engineer, and a stepmother who's a credentialed scientist and journalist. We don't have that problem."

"Sometimes I wonder if Storm feels intimidated by her parents. Do you?" she asked Storm.

"Not really."

It was a very unsatisfactory meeting, mostly because it did what it was meant to do: deflect the parent from being able to ask about what the school was doing, or not doing, on the student's behalf.

Tags: kids
Current Mood: annoyed

These are tearable puns. Not an original idea. I just couldn't find a PDF of it, so I made one.

James Lipton gives advice, both touching and useful, to Mitt Romney on how to act human.

On the other hand, the more Romney demonstrates his position as a classic callous/unemotional neuroatypical (what people used to call "a psychopath,"), and the more we learn about its origins in biology, the less I find the idea of a psychopath's rights movement all that funny. What kind of ribbon would there be? Blood-spattered? Or merely decorated with cartoon illustrations of children's tears?

Just a reminder: The conservative movement is now in the grips of psychopaths who truly do believe that "The mass of mankind is born with saddles on their backs, a favored few born booted and spurred to ride." This was the goal all along.

Unwed mother, wannabe grifter, and conservative welfare queen Bristol Palin lectures our Christian, monogamous, still on his first marriage president Barack Obama on his parenting skills. My irony meter just died.

Recommended reading: What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. If we are allowed to sell our organs, than the poor become "convenient containers of spare parts" and the rich start to define who's human. We don't need Kazuo Ishiguro to tell us where this leads.

Grand Old Party is a data visualization of the popularity of the the various Republican Candidates throughout the primary campaign. It is also a series of butt plugs. [NSFW]

Climate changes is such a big threat, we're too scared to talk about it. Money quote:

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.

Enjoy!

The Black Widow was the most important character in The Avengers, but male reviewers didn't notice.

Welcome to Life. The post-human future, completely ruined by lawyers.

Tags: life
Current Mood: amused

Orcacard.com is the website where Puget Sound & Seattle residents go to "refill" their One Regional Card ("Orca" being more regionally topical than "Orc", I guess). The website has to be one of the least user-friendly on the planet. I'm not even sure why.

If you forget your password on most sites, the routine is usually to say, "I forgot my password," at which point the site sends you an email saying, "Follow this link to reset your password. You have 30 minutes to follow this link before it becomes invalid." On the ORCA site, you have to give your full name, zip code and email address, and answer a "security question," before they send you an email.

They email contains a new password. In the clear.

Worse, when you go to change your password, it's almost impossible to do so: the page directing you to change your password malfunctions badly if you forget to fill out both shipping and billing information (!?). If you tell it "Use my billing address for shipping," it reloads the page instead of using Javascript first, so even if you have a modern browser you're forced to fill out the password form a second time.

Finally, when you go to actually add credit to your card, they don't keep billing information. This is an insane level of paranoia: they put you through PICS-plus level security, and don't even maintain PICS-standard data!

Oh, and the visuals for buying credits are so bad it's easy to accidentally add multiples of what you want to add; check your final statement carefully.

All in all, the ORCA card website is a government-mandated disaster.

Tags: review, website
Current Mood: annoyed

Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you
, Happy Birthday, Traci Lords, Happy Birthday to you.

And, yeah, it's my birthday too. Again. Bleah. 46. I think my warranty has expired. Expect my butt to fall off at any second.

Tags: announcement, birthday
Current Mood: gloomy

Omaha and I wanted to watch Captain America last night, the new one, before we headed out later this week to see The Avengers. We rented from RedBox, the ubiquitous automatic rental kiosks available everywhere, after using their website to determine where in the neighborhood a non-BluRay version could be found. (You have to admit, that's one hell of a good data tracking management system, to be able to ask nationwide, as a customer, if any one machine anywhere has a given copy of a given disc.)

I say "wanted" because the disk we got has a terrible scratch on it, and was unplayable after about the 1:10 mark. This is right after the scene where Hugo Weaving (poor Hugo! Typecast as a villain forever) [redacted].

We tried playing it in the Playstation 2, then the Lasonic (which will try and play a frozen pizza, that thing's amazing, pity about the heat buildup issue...), and finally out laptops. Not even Handbrake could make it past 1:10.

I called RedBox, and they were very kind about giving me two coupons (no refunds, sigh): one for this film, and one for any other film I wanted. Then she said, "Make sure, if you try and take another copy out, that you take it out before you put this one back, or it will just give you the one you have already tried."

I expressed surprise. "Doesn't it know the disc is unuseable?"

"When we send someone to service the box, if it is present we will take it out. But while it is in the box, it is considered in circulation."

That seems like a very unwise policy to me. They're basically relying on luck and chance to get known broken DVDs out of circulation. It also seems somewhate scammy: I wonder what percentage of people who check out the movie just give up and bring it back, and don't call and complain? Surely, even at minimum wage the ten minutes she spent with me isn't worth the $2.50 RedBox just lost, the bad publicity (Hello!), and the ongoing frustration of other users.

Tags: business
Current Mood: annoyed

These are my 2002 and 2012 drivers license photos. I kinda miss the hair, but man, both of them look like I've been drinking all day, don't they?

Current Mood: amused