How to Subscribe to TV Shows Using The Democracy Player, Bittorrent, and RSS, by Jesse Newland.
Charles D'Ambrosio sketches scenes from a pre-boom Puget Sound - my good old days, chilluns - in The New Yorker.
UPDATE: I found the story, as I often do with D'Ambrsio, beautiful and evocative. Interstingly, I distinctly felt that this story was written in conscious dialogue with Alexie and Vollmann. Perhaps someday Vollmann will write of the Northwest directly.
Jon, who has been a bit quiet of late, makes up for it with disquisitions on the American left, his Christianity, and an unimpeachable list of tunes. Clearly, the man is, in fact, the Greatest Bus Driver in the World.
Seriously, I urge you to reflect on that list of music. It lends credence, as it were, and predisposed as I am to listen to Jon on things political it makes me reinspect my impulse to skip the religion component. Jon makes me think, and think hard.
But why does he think Billy is back on the sauce?
Happily, the Powerbook boots smoothy this morning and does not emit the aroma of a brewery, so I presume whatever intoxicant was preventing the machine from operating as expected last night has been metabolized.
As I seated myself on one of the new couches, beer and laptop in hand, the unfamiliarly slick surface and round arms led to a moment of discombobulation which resulted in a sploosh of beer over the keyboard and trackpad of the Powerbook.
At first, it appeared that all was well, but moments ago, the machine froze, and now it won't boot.
Due to the move, I don't know where all my diagnotic emergency CDs are. Bummer.
Today, by some coincidence, we received both a new living room set and a new living room set, one a couch-chair combo in chocolate leather, one a bunch of flat boxes from Ikea. I have completed the build of a chair, a couch, and three shelving units, with two shelving units remaining. I started the day with a brisk round of wood chopping.
Viv wants to go out.
I think I'll give the new couches a nap test.
[via Monkeyfilter] The full-laden containership M/V APL Panama beached in northern Baja Mexico on Christmas day. The ensuing mayhem has been amusingly & anachronistically CHRONICLED by correspondents unknown upon the PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN TO ME web-site of Countryman & McDaniel, attorneys-at-law.
This morning, Puget Sound awakened to an ice storm. Viv and I cautiously took the car about five blocks away before losing control of it on the ice and returning home. As I write this, the radio reports that I-5 offramps are blocked by jackknifed Metro busses.
The snow on our yard was beautiful in the dawn fog. When Viv and I stepped out of the car we took a few moments to listen to the chatter and song of literally hundreds of birds of all sorts in the trees around the house. Sparrows, chickadees, robins, a Steller's Jay, crows, starlings, and possibly a pair of small brown woodpeckers were jostling for roost space in the tallest of our trees, singing and squawking and chasing one another through the branches and into the air.
Curious, I tried to record the birdsong on the Treo. The result was good enough to drive my cats crazy when played back inside the house, ears twitching and heads turning, seeking the source of the chirps and tweets. Sadly, I inadvertently nuked it from the card in attempting to get it posted herein.
UPDATE: e.nature's multimedia bird ID guide helped us finger many of the avians we saw this morning.
Dan takes note of CalTalk, "a freeware iCal Bonjour calendar sharing program."
Interesting. Now if I can solve my parents' multiple-router DCHP battles and get a stable point-to-point connection, we could have a transcontinental LAN with calendar sharing. That would be kinda cool.
Ever wondered about the roots of pan-Arabist nationalism? The Moor Next Door has a longish essay, Three Nadhras of Michel Aflaq, which explores the ideas of a Syrian founder of the Ba'ath party, Michel Aflaq. Nouri notes that Aflaq died in Iraq in 1989. Based on the essay, Aflaq's reinterpretation of European political ideas of the 1930s - notably including fascism - underpin the Ba'athist response to colonialsim. Fascinating.
Personally, I have always sort of understood post-colonial nationalism as a misguided rerun of the European rise of the idea. The point of contention, I guess, is whether or not the construction of a national identity is necessary in order to practice a politics of modernity. After all, the European county I have the most knowledge of and which has the longest-standing democratic form of governance confederated well before the national ideal became important in Europe and consequently has, count 'em, four national languages.
I am happy to report that the dumpstered video projector we have works quite well in combination with our DVD projector and a Lost season one disc.
Postfix Enabler for OS X slaps a GUI on Postfix.
UPDATE: WebMon and MailServe also look worth investigating. Maybe I'll only have to migrate MySQL by hand! That would be sweet.
Daniel Johnston, back in the news, this time as NYT-dubbed 'rising gallery star.'
Manuel seems to have spotted a sunken jet near the Renton Boeing plant.
In January, a 737 was sunk to create a divers' reef near Vancouver Island.
Could this be the PBM-5 that was supposed to be raised about 10 years ago? It looks about the right size. However, the wing profile of the possible plane Manuel found seems more like a jet than a prop plane.
Here is a page on plane wrecks in Lake Washington. The Submerged Cultural Resources Exploration Team maintains a list of dives in the lake; no jet appears among them.
Every few days, I have been grabbing a couple of logs from my fast diminishing woodpile to split for kindling. As I think I noted previously, I needed something to split the logs against, and I have been using a massive piece of scrap wood, a former support beam that I take to have been a leftover from the 1968 house remodel.
As I have cut against it with varying futility, I was somewhat amazed to discover that the beam is solid cedar. I noted this one afternoon as I emerged from my car after work and was astounded by the sharp, lovely scent of fresh-cut cedar emerging from the half-century-old wood.
On my way in to town today, I noticed a two-foot stump by the side of the road along a public greensward. On arriving home this afternoon, I hefted the accursedly heavy thing and stumbled up the hill to my yard, where it now awaits the woodsman's axe. Fetch the tumbril.
The weather here lately is cold and clear, the golden brightness of the sun blaring in some apparent appeal for balance after our forty days of forty nights earlier this year. Today, also, there have been strong winds here and there in the region, causing power outages and the like.
Here, my neighbor's spinning vents are whirling madly. I know this because one needs oiling, badly, and the high-pitched, constant whistling squeak is beginning to drive me nuts.
Of late, I have been breasting my way through the purple prose of Rafael Sabatini's The Sea Hawk (almost nothing, it seems, to do with the Errol Flynn flick of 1940 despite the distinct probability that the film is an adaptation) on my superannuated, but happily green-glowing, Palm Vx. Sadly, as I have come to enjoy reading material in a darkened room, the Palm will not sync with my current main machine, as both it and my Palm-powered phone share a username and there is no easy way to change a username on a Palm machine.
Happily, I experimentally tried beaming a Palm Reader doc from the phone to the decrepit museum piece. It went swimmingly, and now my alarm clock is also my bedside reader, loaded with this and that. If only I could figure out how to cobble a working AvantGo conduit over the beam.
Hannah Levin asks about rumors concerning the sale (and imputed demise) of the sainted Comet, chez Slog. Commenters finger Caffe Vitta as the likely culprit.
On a side note, Slog, please adopt conventional article-and-comment linky pages such that your occasional flashes of wit may become more widely disseminated. Thank you.
NYT: A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can't Pay: "Genentech plans to charge about $100,000 a year for the drug Avastin as a treatment for breast and lung cancer."
It certainly shows evidence of a well thought-out marketing program when you name your only-for-the-wealthy drug after a pre-boarding pirate cry.
Phooey. I fiddled with some network interface settings on whybark.com and have made the server temporarily invisible to the outside world! I think that by the time I post this, things will be put right. Apologies for the disappearance.
KUOW just said that Dick Cheney has accidentally shot someone while on a hunting trip. It appears that the news is too fresh to have any links yet. I wonder if the shootee happened to say "Go fuck yourself" either prior to or shortly after eating hot vice-presidential lead.
The shootee, Harry Whittington, is described as a 78 year old. Could he be the pulp fiction author of "Web of Murder"? Probably not, as that gent is said to have died in 1990.
UPDATE: Note to self: do not approach the veep from behind.
Friday night, the League of Intoxicated Gentlemen hit Capitol Hill.
Saturday, I was somewhat hampered in efforts to move beyond the couch.
ScoutPal, a real-time barcode scanning service for your cellphone intended to be used while crate-digging books. My word.
Pursuant to a project, some research.
The challenge: identify and install any needed software to support the Netgear MP101. The device requires a streaming server on the local network to connect to; the supplied-and-supported server is, of course, Windows-only.
Here's a meticulous review which notes that as long as the device has the proper firmware, it supports playback from a variety of server software, such as the TwonkyVision UPnP MediaServer, which is available for Mac OS X.
The Allegro Media Server as well as the Slim Devices SlimServer also appear to meet my needs, although the interoperability of SlimServer and the MP101 is only inferred (and doubtful). I have previously installed SlimServer and it worked great, until it stopped working.
It also appears that there is an MP101 Yahoo Group.
The first challenge was to associate the device with my Airport; the device only supports 64-bit and 128-bit security and my ancient Airport is only 40-bit. I had to manually enter the appropriate hex key; even then it did not see any valid servers as it polled the DHCP local space only.
UPDATE: Total success. Using Allegro's product, my Mac-hosted iTunes library is transparently visible to the MP101's UPnP. However, for whatever reason, the version of the product they offer for download on their site is miscompiled and will not function as a stand-alone program; I had to track down a 1.0 version.
Building and Installing Apache 2.2.0 and PHP 5.1.2 on Mac OS X 10.4.4
MAMP is apparently not designed to support outward-facing websites, which seems kinda dumb.
UW's Bill Holm Center. The Times' Pacific Northwest Portrait. Holm's massively influential Northwest Coast Indian Art.
Bulk Rename Utility is the first bulk renaming utility I have found for any platform that offers the flexibility, if not the interface, of the late, lamented Drop•Rename (grepping excepted as a non-GUI technique).
via FLOG: there's a stop-motion Freak Brothers movie in production. Dear God.
I finally completed the Vollmann. Poking about, I find I picked it up late last April and must have started it in May.
Until I unlimber the man's McSweeney slipcase edition of the violence books, it's library books for me for a good long while.
Spencer appears to have discovered that not only is there a troll under the Aurora Bridge, there may be giants in your recycle bin.
I wonder, is my pooptastic bum from a couple years ago some sort of mythic being, too? I sort of like the idea of mapping classical myths onto problematic urban apparitions.
Today is the first day in months that we've had tons of sunlight in the house.
The cats, quick on the uptake, have demonstrated a keen grasp of the purpose of the great washes of golden warmth.
This, I think, should be enjoyable. It's not clear if the device is Mac compatible, but it would only add to the fun if not.
An NYT article on a pair of long-lived diabetic brothers, 86 and 90, respectively - both men contracted the disease as children - notes the relative paucity of long lives among Type I diabetics:
"They're a little bit obsessive about their records and their diets," said Dr. George L. King, research director of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School. He heads a study of people who have lived with diabetes for at least 50 years — more than 400 of them, so far.
They arrive at the center, he said, carrying "years and years of records, sometimes decades," showing medical tests, blood sugar readings, insulin doses, exercise, even daily food consumption. "Most of them do quite a bit of exercise, they are more careful about their health than even most diabetics, and they also have a very positive outlook."
Hm. I can't describe Viv as obsessive, and she's not 50 yet by a long shot; but there's no way she won't see it. She certainly does a great job with maintenance and has a great attitude.
Four hundred? She's rarer than I'd have thought. We're both lucky!
This week's This American Life (URL not valid until next week) explores a story that amused me when I saw it blow by in the online edition of the NYT a ways back. Involves Russians, artists, young people, and rum (or cognac).
The show's second half is a melancholy revue of life in New Orleans, post-Katrina, that sounds like a prophecy for America.
Enjoy!
BoingBoing links to a webcomic by a fellow whose pal purchased a large number of 99-cent vibrators, and gave them to him.
I split wood again tonight for a few minutes. The block I'm splitting against is too low for comfort but I do not have a good way to raise it for the moment. Stooping to pick up the flinders kills my back within minutes. My right arm is a bit sore, which I take as a good sign. My aim seems to be improving a bit, but I am far from consistent and can't reliably make the desired two-to-one-inch kindling I'm after.
It's amazing how much of a sweat I get into - the work simply doesn't seem that hard. A friend at work jokingly asked when was the last time I walked more than a couple of blocks, and I was surprised to realize it was since before we moved, of course. I need to find more places to routinize exercise now that we're not in such a walkable neighborhood.
In the back yard, I drop ants of differing appearance into the reservoir portion of a spray bottle filled with water. Peering into the neck of the bottle with one eye, the ants appear as huge as cars and people. They can walk along the walls of the bottle and do so, carefully gathering air into a diving-bell about their rear body segment. When one kind of ant encounters a different sort of ant, they battle ferociously until one is dead.
Much to my parents' puzzlement and occasional frustration, I hated working in the yard. I wanted to help, and the yard's size really needed extra hands. But for whatever reason, or constellation of them, nearly all my memories of working outside at my childhood home are unhappy.
I made reference to the first one of these earlier in the week. The blizzard of '78 blew snow up over the roof of the house's garage. My father and I, as well as my sister and mother, worked for two days or so to clear the drive and the walks. The experience made me reluctant to shovel snow, although I recall (however self-servingly) having accepted the snow-shoveling chore as mine by the end of high school. My recollection is that I realized how relatively infrequent heavy snowstorms were, although the entire time we resided in Bloomington, a heavy accumulation of snow from December through March was the norm.
I recall one singularly unpleasant spring afternoon when I volunteered to help my dad in the yard, hopefully determined to learn from him and to try to understand his sense of pride, interest, and accomplishment. He set me to weeding with a 12-inch tool designed to aid the ept in the removal of weeds such as dandelions, which send long tap-roots down into the soil and should be removed with as much of the long tail as possible. Typically, I was unable to use the tool with any accuracy and failed to bring up a single weed-root whole. Frustrated, I recall asking my dad why this was, him attempting to demonstrate, and my inability to grasp his technique resulting in my angry insistence that I would do it my own way or none. We shouted at one another for a while and I retreated in tears.
One stormy night, a power line fell in our back yard, near my mom's garden. The arcing line lit up the woods and house in terrible, phantasmagoric flashes, white steam and sulfurous smoke billowing up from the naked wire grounding itself in my mother's topsoil. I had the presence of mind to grab my Pentax K1000 and shoot in the night as the firefighters and linemen secured the scene.
Of course, mowing the lawn fell to me, a task which I at first found difficult for reasons of physical strength. The lot is not level, and we had a typical gas mower of the time with no drive wheels, all-steel and push only. I think when I started mowing the lawn I was about eleven and weighed darn near 90 pounds. It was frightening for me to wrestle this barking machine with whirling blades that weighed half as much as I did. The broiling heat and wretched humidity of the Indiana summer combined with the mower chaff to create a truly miserable experience. With creativity and determination, I was on some occasions able to flog myself with this particular willow branch for eight to ten hours.
In the garage, a forty-year old refrigerator, all streamlined white enamel and chromed aluminum, holds bottle after bottle of cold Big Red. No matter how many I drink, it's still too hot, and I'm still thirsty. I open another one and watch the condensation run off the bottle and down my wrist.
Later, during high school, I had more or less figured out that if one really threw oneself into something horrible it would get completed more rapidly, so I would attempt to run while pushing the mower in order to complete the task as rapidly as possible. I recall with much greater clarity the day I awakened with the first of my truly gargantuan hangovers, epic spectacles in which the armies of Hannibal clash with those of Rome. Up and down the length of my peninsula they rage for thirty or forty years. Hotly contested rear guard actions vie with undammed rivers, fountaining past the gates of my teeth. Such intensity of struggle makes man or boy weak in the knees and not well suited to pushing loud hot steel about under a 98-degree sun. On this day the mowing lasted a full eight hours but seemed to take much, much longer.
Four-foot black garden snakes writhe, intertwined, in the grass of our lawn, mating. With a nine-iron, a neighbor beats the snakes to death as they mate.
I tried to be of assistance to my mother in her garden, but again, the weather defeated me. The terrible heat and humidity of these summer days and the thuggish strength and scope of the intolerably cold winters led me to wonder what sort of madmen would have chosen to settle where we lived. The entire time we lived there, I was told that winters were not always so cold and summers not always so hot. The hottest days I recall featured a week of 100% humidity and 110 degrees around summer 1986 and the coldest a streak of minus 30 degrees one winter around that time, '85, '86, or '87. Friends tell me winters are much milder now.
My father hopefully planted a grape arbor in the back yard one summer, and the vine started but only fruited a few small, sad grapes before slowly ceasing to grow. I think it was taken out by a subsequent owner.
Sometime in the '80s, a large oak fell into our yard from Mary's side of the fence. I helped Dad trim it and lay it so it was not terribly in the way. As we were doing so I had the bright idea of seeing if it could be sold to a local lumbermill, as there is an active forestry industry in Southern Indiana. To my surprise, I was able to do so under Indiana law and the lumbermill was willing to buy. I can't recall how much the log fetched but I think it was over a hundred bucks.
In spring, flower poachers wheelbarrow daffodils from the lanes of Mary's farm out to the highway. Are they family, or are they thieves?
Laughing, I throw the balsa and styrofoam airplane again and again, amazed at the added distance the innovation of formed airfoils to the toy has made. Catching a thermal, the blue-and-tan craft rises and rises before falling off the air spiral and coming to rest nearly a mile away. I catch up to it breathlessly, amazed and enthusiastic.
Paul at notes that the National Weather Service is predicting a major windstorm for Western Washington Friday and Saturday, including "sustained winds (lasting around a minute) of 40 MPH or wind gusts to 58 mph." Tree and line damage is mentioned.
I'm starting this entry too late to do it justice - 10 pm. Despite this, here are some dates and events associated with my family's residence in my Bloomington childhood home.
Summer, 1976. We move to Bloomington from West Lafayette. Previously my family had come to town for an academic conference or interview and stayed on the square in the only building over ten stories centrally located off campus, a hotel which is abandoned for most of the time between 1978 and 1990. I sleep in a dresser drawer, and retain the sense memory to this day. I recommend the experience, unless you are one of my cats.
Winter, 1978. Snow drifts above the second story of the house, completely burying the garage. My father and I shovel it, regardless. Several weeks prior to this I spent nearly four hours waiting for a school bus that never came with other freaked-out preadolescents, desperately scrounging for sources of heat. I recall the disappointment we felt when a book of matches failed to warm us for more than a few seconds.
Summer, 1982. My family returns from a year abroad. I am much changed. I attend school in fear. My fear is well-based, as the remainder of my high-school career will be marked by unpredictable explosions of violence directed at me. This is somewhat offset by my sudden popularity with the ladies.
Fall, 1984. My sister and I both graduate high school and move out. By odd circumstance we move into a two-bedroom apartment together. Incredibly unrestrained sibling fights take place, but by the end of that summer, sibling rivalry has been fought out and replacing is is an amazing bond, something I never had felt before and mourn to this day.
Spring 1986 (?). Both my sister and my parents return from abroad; in the intervening year, the barn in Mary's woods has burned down. Or something. I have the dates or who was in town wrong, I think.
Early 1988. My sister returns to live with may parents, probably depressed.
September, 1988. My sister is killed on her bicycle on her way to see a friend. The old world ends; the one I live in begins.
Indian Summer, 1988. A memorial potluck is held in my family's back yard, a kind of wake for the funeral or something. In my heart I know that I'm leaving town and expect that my parents are too. It's the last extensive memory I have of the house, a polyglot crowd eating and drinking under the locust tree I'd seen grow from a sapling to a pod-dropping nuisance. I think Mary was dead by then as I recall crossing the fence to stroll up in the woods, knowing I was to leave them.
I loved my hometown but I hated Indiana, the weather and the enclosing horizon, the culture of limits. While my parents, children of the Great West, sought a connection to the older American culture and savored, natively, the more circumscribed expressions of two centuries of Americanness and Midwestern folkways, I chafed. So when my sister died and my girlfriend wanted to move on, I did.
Fifteen years later, it's clear to me that what I learned most clearly was how to be uncomfortable, because today I find Seattle as tiresomely oppressive as the place I left. There's no doubt that the cultures are different. What do they have in common? My vantage point.
[via Boing Boing]: GLTerminal, an experience emulator for those who once loved Plato or the VT100 or those in love with lo-fi.
Matt, wishing he wasn't a tourist: Back Home again in New Orleans.
What is it that we mean when we say "home?"
