So I picked up Little Brother and Cathy’s Key last week. I guess this is where I get to be a Young Adult for a little while. I have to admit to being a little sheepish at shopping in the Young Adult section of the store. I started reading Little Brother, and even at my glacially slow reading rate, am about halfway through.

The book itself is quite scary in a psychological what-if way. If I had to use one word to describe it so far, it would be “claustrophobic.” It starts with some teenage friends living in San Francisco when a terrorist attack occurs. The Department of Fatherland Homeland Security swoops in and pretty much turns the city into a military state indefinitely, constantly chiseling away at people’s liberties–and not in an exaggerated way, either, but in a realistic step-by-step frog-in-boiling-water fashion. The teen and friends start doing things to subvert the system. The most scary thing about the book is that it is all quite possible. The DHS stuff is totally believable. The stuff the kids do is perfectly accurate given current technology (heck, the character even has an Instructables account with the projects.) Well, technically accurate (from what I’ve read so far), except for the remote writing of RFID chips. The fictitious version of Linux described in the book is becoming reality (ParanoidLinux.) The whole thing just solidifies more and more in my mind how much of a genius and luminary Cory Doctorow is.

Today was a lovely day. In fact, the wonderful weather stretched well into the evening. I pulled out a camp chair, and made myself a not-mint-julip [more information further down], and finished off another few chapters in the front lawn. I have to say that I have a love/hate relationship with the neighbor Siamese cat. He’s cute and friendly and lovable. He’s chatty. He’s also pushy and prissy and selfish. He thinks he owns you. He’s actually scared off some of the other neighborhood cats, in an attempt to horde the attention. (Fortunately, they’re starting to take a stand and fight back.) He jumped up on my lap and constantly fought the book for attention.

Oh, the not-a-mint-julip? I invented it over the weekend when I wanted a mint julip, but did not want the hammered-ness that comes with the four shots that typically comprise one. I swapped out three of the shots for about an equal amount of filler:

* Put 8-10 mint leaves in the bottom of a lowball/old-fashioned glass
* Add 1 tsp simple syrup[1] (or 2-3 tsp, if you’re Kim)
* Muddle it
* Add 3-4 ice cubes
* Add 1oz Maker’s Mark
* Add ~3oz of club soda
* Garnish with a mint sprig
* Enjoy

[1] Simple syrup, in case you do not already know: boil 1 cup water, remove from heat, add 2 cups sugar, stir until dissolved, let cool completely. Can be refrigerated in a clean glass jar.

I picked up a book called The Affected Provincial’s Companion a few weeks ago. This was a book that was indirectly recommended on some steampunk-something-or-other. While not directly ‘punk, it does a great job of capturing the more formal and stuffy neo-Victorian attitude. It is a guidebook of attire and behavior that is written tongue-in-cheek and greatly exaggerates a few things, but actually does have some good information at its core. The silliness makes it more accessible. While poking fun at itself, it even does a good job of making fun of hipsters, dudebros, and backward-hat-and-sportswear gangstas.

Obviously, the book is not for everyone, but if it sounds like the sort of thing you would be in to, you will undoubtedly enjoy it. There are a great many diagrams (some more silly than others.) The one that I have gotten the biggest kick out of is the Bohemian-Dandy Continuum. One of the quotes leading up to it is:

Bohemianism ignores rules that mainstream society cannot afford to disregard, whereas Dandyism obeys rules that mainstream society cannot afford to observe.

The continuum itself can be thought of as a cylinder. The left and right sides are joined together (so that the dotted line forms an angled oval.) The rich are at the top, the poor are at the bottom, and the intersecting relationship between bohemians and dandys becomes visible.

Yes, it is an entirely silly diagram, but the attention to detail! Therein lies the humor!

Dear LazyWeb,

Do any of you fine Mac folks know how to get the Command-Left-Arrow and Command-Right-Arrow keyboard shortcuts working when editing a message in Gmail? In every other application, and in fact in every other website under Firefox, they do the regular system “beginning of line” and “end of line” positioning. For some reason, with Gmail’s email editor, they do nothing at all. I assume it has something to do with it being a RichText editing box. Google searches for help don’t turn up much of anything useful.

The keyboard inconsistency is one of those things that isn’t a total deal-breaker because I can use the happy Unix ctrl-a and ctrl-e keystrokes to do the same thing, but it’s been bugging me for months.

Every morning, the grind-n-brew coffee maker greets me with warm, delicious coffee. It has the sort of grinder with blades that makes a loud noise. (And yes, I would have gone with a burr grinder had they been available in a consumer grind-n-brew ten years ago when I got it.) Through a freak of timing, the grinder starts up about 30 seconds before the alarm clock starts beeping. Through a freak of turn-of-last-century ductwork, the sound carries up to the bedroom quite well.

As a result of all of this, I am typically half-roused from sleep by the grinder, then fully awake when the alarm beeps. The very same thing happened this morning–only the coffee maker was not set up and all of its parts were still in the drying rack. This leads me to wonder what the heck it was that woke me up before the alarm.

vpisteve: sadtrombone.com has now been banned from the office
BrianEnigma: @vpisteve I decompiled the Flash and loaded the MP3 into my iPhone for instant sadtrombone action! also: rimshot
vpisteve: @BrianEnigma you are my hero

Last week, I discovered a flaw in this particular plan. Let me paint you a picture to illustrate. It is nearing the end of a bright and sunny, warm day. The long, yet productive, day of work has concluded and it is time to drive home. The situation calls for–nay, screams for–the convertible’s top to be down with some nice, loud singable (or yellable) music. This leads to a very cathartic drive home. The Cure’s weird and energetic cover of Purple Haze plays, followed by Nine Inch Nail’s Echoplex. The song starts to spin down, but is still a little loud from when it was compensating for the freeway wind, as the car exits the freeway and pulls up to a red light, alongside other cars and trucks. To the right is downtown’s popular, large waterfront park. Several people are waiting at the crosswalk. You’re bopping along to the trailing chords, with cool shades and windswept hair. And because the iPhone is on shuffle, you then get an extremely loud and embarrassing rimshot that no one can ignore.

Based on feedback, both online and off, I think I am going to go with a Flickr Pro account for my photo hosting. The Aperture integration is beautiful and the functionality is great. I’ll miss being able to pull up stats and the ability to mess with people who hot-link pictures from MySpace.

I’m waiting a week or two because the wildcard is Apple’s rumored upgrades to the .Mac service in a week. Their services and disk space have never warranted the $99/year price tag, but if they are able to significantly lower the price or significantly increase their service offering, then I might go that route. The rumors also point to better iPhone integration, which (depending on the feature set and price) would be nice, too. At the very least, I am waiting to see how this pans out.

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There was a bad TV show in the 80s. Well, there were a lot of bad TV shows in the 80s, but the theme song of one in particular has been stuck in my head for days. I wonder if you remember this particular show? The main character was a girl and she was either a young teen or pre-teen. She was half alien, living with her (human) mom in a fancy house in one of the “bay” towns in California (Morro Bay, Bodega Bay, something like that.) She had some kind of crystal cube, propped up on one corner, that (with the help of horrid 80s television special effects) she could use to talk to her dad, in outer space or whatever. I think she had some kind of powers, but I don’t remember what. Anyway, the theme song was this Frank Sinatra song “would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar?” I only saw it a few times, but either it was on all the time or my little sister really liked to watch it a lit–I don’t know which.

I do not think that knowing the name of the show will cause the theme song to exit my head, but it will be one less “on the top of my tongue” thing bugging me.

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Our house seems to be the hangout spot for all the cool cats in the neighborhood. And by cats, I mean cats. We are sort of next door to a concrete and asphalt apartment complex and the pointy-nose Siamese over there seems to find our yard much more fun and interesting than his place. Additionally, there’s a black and white fuzzy cat from a neighbor in the other direction that always wants to hang out at our place. There are several others, too, that we only catch glimpses of. The Siamese and black-and-white are the most chatty.

Exhibit One: There have been a few mornings where I wake up, stumble down the stairs, and glance over at the cat sitting on the kitchen windowsill. After a quick double-take, I look again at the cat sitting on the outside kitchen windowsill, looking in.

Exhibit Two: If we leave the door open and the screen door closed, throughout the day the Siamese and black-and-white will take turns coming to the door to talk to us. Yesterday, while doing work around the house, each one was at the door a dozen times throughout the day.

Exhibit Three: Bribery. While not intended to bribe cats to our house, we do happen to be growing (or maybe past-tense would be more correct) catnip in a little terra-cotta trough out front. This seems to have attracted the attention of all the neighborhood kitties. It is heavily grazed upon, often knocked over, and on a few occasions, has been uprooted and pulled from the pot, left several feet away. It’s dead enough at this point that it is no longer of much kitty interest.

Exhibit Four: The white picket fence separating the front yard and back yard has a very deliberate slat missing from it. We have dubbed this “the kitty highway” because of the number of cats that use it to get to and from the back yard.

Exhibit Five: The birdfeeder is similarly dubbed “kitty TV” because cats, both inside the house and out, spend hours staring at it.

The good news is that everyone is much less hissy now: our cats interactions with the neighbor cats and the neighbor cats amongst one another. One day, everyone will be living in peace.

The other good news is that I doubt we will ever have a rodent problem of any kind.

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I’d tell you to mark your calendars, but I don’t know a date yet. We will be having some kind of BBQ/potluck/housewarming party in a month or so. December, even though the white Christmas was nice, was not very conducive to a housewarming. In the intervening time, the state of (dis)repair of the house was not particularly conducive, either. But now, things are clean and stable enough that we can get away with having a housewarming we can be proud of. Keep an eye open for an email or phone call from Kim or I in the next week or so, as we figure out what weekend works best for her and her travels.

Google changed their favicon!

I really don’t like the new one.

These are my predictions for the season finale Lost. They don’t come from spoilers or secret information, they’re just guesses and intuition and are probably wrong.

* The episode will end with Jin in some kind of perilous situation to save Sun. Sun and the other Oceanic 6 will believe him to be dead. Even the audience will believe him to be dead, but he’ll really be okay when the situation is revisited in an episode next season. (Remember when Ben shot Locke?)
* Locke will end up moving the island and it will require typing the numbers into another one of those Dharma Apple computers.
* The rest of the military guys will die, but the main one (Mr. Kimi?) will survive and track people around the island throughout the next season.
* Faraday and angry-redhead-British-girl will get stuck on the island when it moves.
* We’ll get to see the method or apparatus that Ben used to time-travel. It uses some kind of really cold superconductor technology (which is why we see Ben in the middle of the desert with a parka.)
* We’ll see another orientation video that details (but without too much detail) the operation of the Orchid station.
* We’ll see the smoke monster again, but still won’t know anything more about it.
* We still won’t know the nature of the cabin, Jack’s Dad, Charlie, or what Claire is up to.
* There will be at least one “WAAAAAALLLLLT!” scream from Michael.
* When the island moves, the little electronic gizmo strapped to Mr. Kimi’s arm will be out of range of the ship and cause the C4 to blow up. Fortunately, the mechanics of the schema get radioed back to the ship so they’re safely on life rafts by the time the island gets moved.
* Hurley says “dude,” Sawyer says “son of a bitch,” and Ben reveals this has all been part of a larger plan.

For the longest time, up through some point in my teenage years, I had the misconception that Oscar Wilde and Gene Wilder were the same person. Because, really, it wasn’t too difficult seeing Willy Wonka as a flamboyant writer.

Earlier in life, I had the wrong idea about the underground railroad. I pictured something like the Indiana Jones mine cars, only the tunnels were a couple of feet high and the mine cars were more like the flat wheeled, padded boards that mechanics use to lie on their back and work under cars, but they were on rails. I even figured they had hardhats with integrated flashlights. In my mind, the tunnels went from house to house, town to town. I’m not sure how old I was when I outgrew this idea.

What’s the point to this? I have no clue. Sometimes I’m easily confused, I guess.

Currently, I keep all of my photos in Aperture. I then use a plugin to sync from there to my own photo site, running the Gallery PHP application. I also use the Flickr export plugin to sync to Flickr. This setup is getting increasingly problematic. The Gallery installation and integration is starting to fall apart. Gallery has enough photos (a little over 19,000) to now be pretty slow. The plugin is getting more and more clunky, often silently failing at random times.

I really like having control/ownership over my photos and photo site, but Gallery just is not cutting it anymore. I have a free Flickr account and really like the community there, but have fears that while its current intentions are good, it may eventually go the LiveJournal route of crappy service at some point in the future.

So that’s my situation. I’d like to hear from two sorts of people:

* Folks that have a paid Flickr account: Is it worth it? Are there weird limits or gotchas that are not apparent in the Flickr Pro account marketing material?
* Folks that are syncing Aperture to something besides Flickr or Gallery (is there anything else?) or folks that are using the Aperture web gallery with something other than the over-priced and under-featured dot-Mac.