Interesting thread on writer’s software at Mefi.

I am amazed to discover that I lack an early digital video cable, the M1 variety. Monoprice is there for me, natch.

Not sure why, but as I was posting this I remembered that my parents were supposed to send me the family pachinko machine, like, two years ago. Outrage, or a good excuse for a cross country road trip?

Much of my dream space last night was occupied by a dream about bagels, wherein I made several dozen and then inexplicably bought six, hot from the oven, for twenty dollars, grumbling about the price. I am not sure if I bought them from myself or what.

I was the bagel maker at a coffee shop in my youth and once entirely forgot I knew how to make them. On a whim I invited a friend over and once the ingredients were assembled, muscle memory took over and it was as if I had been possessed. I watched my body move efficiently and swiftly through the steps of the process, agape and not knowing how it knew what to do.

About the time the bagels were going into and out of the boiling water, my on-hand lack of a large steel mixing bowl to boil the water in (the 20-inch diameter of the water surface meant you could get eight or so in at a time) FINALLY triggered a clear, conscious memory of mixing, kneading, turning, twisting, and baking.

How it is that one can totally forget something that one loves remains a complete mystery.

I don’t think I will bake some today – twenty bucks is an outrage – but I might roll out on a bagel quest later on. Seattle is in general sorely lacking in east coast deli food but there are indeed a few decent bagel sources. Thank god.

As briefly noted earlier, I have been working through using Amazon EC2 instances as an on-demand proxy. I am making progress, and can reliably launch and ssh into a given instance.

The problem is that so far I can’t figure out how to share that ssh connection with applications or the operating system. There are plenty of tutorials that cover setting up the OS or an app (usually a web browser) to use an sash session as a proxy; my problem appears to be that once I have ssh up, the session is not being shared outside the establishing application.

This could be a consequence of some firewalling I am unaware of or it could be something more fundamental (application walls or something) which the easy-to-find pre-Lion and pre-Win7 tutorials don’t have to address.

Anyway. Learning.

Fellow small-scale retail entrepeneur Steerforth holds forth on “Brand Wheels,” an infographic abomination I have thus far thankfully missed out on.

His judgement is law.

Totally digging Mitchum in “The Big Steal,” 1949, which appears to have been shot on location in Veracruz and elsewhere.

Huzzah! A comical-book themed story by the estimable Michael Chabon in the new ish of the New Yorker, “Citizen Conn.”

“Though he was at the time unknown to me even by reputation, I soon learned that my own husband had been among the millions of American boys in the nineteen-sixties whose minds were blown by Feather’s art work in comic books such as The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane.”

Sounds like he’s doing a Ditko take, mashed up with some other folks. Yes, that first fictionalized title is a Watchmen shoutout; in Moore’s comic, the title is a right-wing scandal sheet trusted by Rorshach with his memoirs. Ditko is legendary for his ground-breaking work for Marvel (on Spiderman and Doctor Strange), and for his eccentric legend as a big fan of Ayn Rand.

I haven’t read more than the first couple sentences, but the clever layering of Moore’s fictional right-wing publication into a Ditkoesque career seems amusing and appropriate. Among other things, Watchmen was a fictionalization of comics history, and that is a thing that Chabon has delighted in giving us for years now.

UPDATE: The story is more a take on the Stan Lee – Jack Kirby – Ditko thing, with Kirby and Ditko compressed into the single character of Mort Feather.
WITH a full-on cameo by none other than Seattle’s own Comics Journal, an issue of which is described as featuring a Gary Groth endless interview with the story’s Lee-alike, the “Citizen Conn” of the tale’s title.

The New Yorker has a discussion with Chabon on the piece up.

He sez Lee-Kirby, so I guess my Ditko stuff up top is off base.

Many incremental successes today.

A troubleshooting session with a software vendor went smoothly enough, and now orders are flowing, more or less, directly into Quickbooks. This will inevitably dramatically increase accounting issues but it also transforms my inventory monitoring and reordering into something to which I can apply Quickbooks analytical tools. Which, well, they are what they are.

I taught myself how to strip, crimp, and verify cat-11 telephone cable. I also installed and verified a couple of additional phone jacks.

I reviewed my annual haystack of tax reporting forms and it looks like I am only missing a couple, which means I am probably a week away from filing.
I am clearly noticing my heart rate improving while running. I still need to check with the docs about my sacroiliac stuff.

I began working through some products in Amazon AWS, specifically EC2 server setup and usage. Some fiddly bits defeated me, as I was using downtime on the tech support call and it has been years since I had to use PuTTY for ssh and the like.

This past week, I started working on getting Viv set up to use her iPad as an A/V playback device, installing an ElGato TV receiver on the media Mini and then banging on antenna reception. I managed to rewire the existing forty year old roof aerial and currently we are missing only the Kitsap-located tower signal that carries channel 13 and the signals from Tacoma that carry KBCT. This is kind of aggravating because I like KBCT’s programming more than KCTS’.

We do receive it in the guest room, which makes no sense: the five dollar antenna there gets it but the six foot aluminum kite on the roof does not. Electromagnetic waves: how do they work?

Anyway the upshot of all this extreme retro nerdery is that our iPads and iPhones are now portable televisions. The EyeTV app only supports one viewer at a time, though, so you can steal the broadcast away from other users on the LAN, which has delighted our inner brats no end.

Some time in the past couple weeks I also moved all of our object-based playback media into a more useable setup, so we can easily get to the vinyl and CDs and cassettes. The stuff still needs to be organized, especially the CDs, but at least it is no longer hidden from sight. I’m sort of contemplating some roofline shelving for the discs, but am not totally sold on the idea.

Running still going as previously noted. Looks like I am settling into about a mile and a half a day, plus a mile walked with the pooch. Still puzzled about what people mean when they describe exercise as something that makes them feel good. An interesting aspect of watching the time of the run and my heart rate is how similar the time needed and apparent personal physical effects are to my father’s longtime exercise regime.

I have a hard time imagining I will get into the same kind of shape he was when he was my age, though. That guy would bust his ass every morning for twenty minutes, and so far I would not describe what I am doing as ass busting.

It is sort of motivating me to work on the room the treadmill’s in, though. Next thing: music.

It must be over 60, sunny and warm!

Another beautiful day wasted down in the basement. This was the third amazingly sunny warm day in a row and neither Viv nor I had time to go enjoy the weather.

I can’t recall if I blogged this or not, but I bought Viv a decent midmarket treadmill off Craigslist for her birthday. It’s a Smooth 6.25, about six years old, and in pretty good shape, new-looking at first glance.

Both she and I have been using it, and to my surprise I have been using it more than Viv. I was diagnosed with a genetic degenerative bone disease this past fall, and the disease affects my sacroiliac. I suppose it might not actually be a great idea to start running but far be it from me to miss a chance to spit in the eye of God, or fate or the cops or whatever you got.

People who actually like exercise claim it makes them feel good. Ever since I was a kid it only ever made me feel sick, headachey and mad at the world and so forth, so I have no legitimate beef to avoid it these days since that is my default state anyway.

So far, yeah, it makes me feel terrible and sometimes gives me the dry heaves. I run barefoot, and am sort of amused that I appear to be developing calluses on my feet that are superior to my stringed-instrument calluses.

If that isn’t conclusive evidence of a moral crisis, of values that fly in the face of civilization and justice, I don’t know what is.

In other news of poor personal judgement and sketchy moral values, Br. Spencer Sundell handed me my ass on a plate in a spirited discussion of my long-term loathing of the political values exhibited by Neal Stephenson in his high period works, beginning with Cryptonomicon. In essence, he made me promise to read some of the stuff since Cryptonomicon, that bible of Ron Paul cryptofascism. I may start with Reamde, since I gather that the bad guys in that book are war blogger wet dream islamofascists and therefore I can continue to hate on the motherfucker as a propagandizing tool.