Month: December 2004

Vacation means never having to say “Sorry for not blogging”

But I’ll say it anyway. We’ve been busy, of course; who hasn’t? We got two inches of snow and temperatures around 4° Fahrenheit from Sunday to Monday; have already had a turkey dinner, pizza night, and spicy Thai beef soup along with homemade apple and lemon meringue pies, homemade biscotti, and homemade cookies; and will be working on jambalaya tonight, traditional Italian fish tomorrow night, and pork tenderloin with risotto on Christmas day.

Lest you get the wrong impression, we have also occasionally left the house—for last minute Christmas shopping, grocery replenishment, and even a joint photo shoot with me and Esta (pictures to come sometime next week). I borrowed my Mom’s copy of the family genealogy; also next week the genealogy pages will be updated with many of the cousins on her side.

And, it being Christmas with seven people under one roof, we are also swapping new and interesting upper respiratory conditions. If the drive down was a little tense, the drive back should be positively nervewracking with all the blowing of noses, hacking coughs, and “I said, bake a left turd here idto de parkig lot! Why are you laughing ad be?”

Ah, Christmas.

A long day’s journey into …turkeys

No posting for a day or two, because we’ve been on the road. For a very long time. We left Arlington at 7 am Friday morning and for once made it through Connecticut with a minimum of fuss, pulling into Lakewood, New Jersey at 5 past noon.

That was the easy day. The next morning, after spending an hour with a shoehorn in front o four trunk the night before, we loaded four people, two dogs,and a week’s worth of baggage into the Passat and left—at 6:45 am sharp. It was 7:55 PM, after a blockage on I-81 in Maryland and a very long day of driving, that we pulled into my parents’ place in the Asheville, NC “suburbs.”

It may be a while between posts this week. My dad’s phone line only does about 28.8. But rest assured, we’ll fill you in when we get back.

Oh, and turkeys: this morning when we awoke, there was a flock of wild turkeys moving along the edge of the lawn. Gone now, alas, but we have snow to compensate.

Cingular: raising the bar for clueless marketing

As a subscriber of the service formerly known as AT&T Wireless, I have to give Cingular props for not fumbling the technical changeover; my service is just as good (or, at my house, as bad) as it was before. The same, sadly, can’t be said for their marketing.

My plan was a promotional deal through Microsoft, my former employer. I have a Nokia 3650 camera phone and a plan that provides me with data minutes, most of which I use in a given month. So how is it that Cingular has decided that I’d be interested in “upgrading” to a free Nokia 6010 that has a tenth of the capabilities of the phone I have now—no “M-Life,” no camera, no Symbian OS?

Either Cingular doesn’t have access to the data about me which would tell them how to market more effectively to me—unlikely, as my bill now carries their logo—or else they’re just choosing not to exploit it. Dumb, Cingular.

Here’s how to get my business as a cell phone customer: stop sending me condescending direct mail pieces that are based on the premise that my phone is a five year old piece of crap. Show me some cool technology that I don’t know about yet. Tell me how to use the phone I have to better integrate with my life. Direct mail is OK—better than marketing email pitches—but it would be better if you did it in an unobtrusive way, say a blog. Just a thought.

More Mac OS X command line goodness

MacOSXHints: Set system and network prefs from the Terminal. There have always been command line tools for setting prefs in Mac OS X Server; this article shows you how to get access to the same tools by installing the free Apple Remote Desktop client, and walks you through a few sample uses.

This always drove me nuts on Windows XP. If you’re going to have a command line in a system at all, it would be nice if you could do some useful things with it—especially on remote machines.

It’s not just in the red states

Boston Herald: Newton mom ousted for taping gay acceptance ‘lies’. In the middle of an optional student assembly that was put on as part of Diversity Week, a mom in the Boston suburb of Newton decided she didn’t want what she was hearing from the stage, so she started videotaping the discussion—presumably so she could have a record of what she called “propaganda, false information, and lies.”

Lots of nasty bits here. First, the mom, Kim Cariani, had already kept her kids home that day. —Which itself brings a question: why home? The article says that kids who didn’t want to attend could go to the library or the computer lab. Was Cariani afraid that being in the same building with the speakers would contaminate her kids? —Anyway, Cariani wasn’t objecting because of her children. This was definitely a woman with an agenda.

Second, the moment that supposedly pushed Cariani over the edge was when one of the speakers on the stage first discovered that he was gay, in particular describing the first moment he was attracted to another man. Was this the “false information and lies” that Cariani wanted to have a record of?

Third, what was she planning to do with the tape exactly?

I think there’s no question that the principal at Newton North High did the right thing. In general preventing taping of students without prior parental permission is an intelligent thing to do, and especially in an assembly like this where the kids who want to learn, or who may be coming to grips with some feelings of being “different” themselves, could get scarred by feeling that they were being watched by disapproving eyes.

This overzealous parent wasn’t thinking about the children, though. She was thinking about her own agenda, and to hell with anyone who stood in her way.

Google vs. Project Gutenberg?

Upon reading about Google’s plans to digitize and make searchable the research libraries of UMich, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library of Oxford (coverage, among other places: The New York Times, Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Joi Ito), I thought about my former coworkers at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. I wondered about their not being part of this announcement; the center has been involved for a long time with making public domain works available. In fact, I helped convert some texts to the center’s custom SGML format myself when I worked there ten years ago.

And many of the texts we worked with came from Project Gutenberg, the often discussed and more often ignored project to make out-of-copyright books electronically available to the public domain. I wonder, too, why their name isn’t on the announcement. And why none of the newspaper accounts even mentioned them.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. After all, Gutenberg’s texts are already searchable by Google. But why wouldn’t they hop into this project?

Blogging about books about blogging

New York Times: A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books). The article name-checks all the usual suspects, including Salam Pax, Jessica Cutler, Ana Marie Cox, Belle de Jour, Real Live Preacher, Julie Powell, and Elizabeth Spiers, but misses Tony Pierce (though he did get featured on Screen Savers). The interesting thing is that bloggers may be more interesting to publishers not because their everyday writing is readily accessible for judging but because they come with a built-in audience. So much for the art of literature.

Getting hungry

Carie pointed me to Bob Heffner’s Pepperoni Roll Page after I enquired about the origin of the fantastic snacks she brought me for my birthday. It’s my kind of food origin story—starting with an Italian baker in West Virginia looking to find a good portable snack food for Appalachian coal miners, and ending with a special federal exemption for the West Virginia bakers who produce them to get around rules about bread and meat products (no, seriously).

Cheeselords uber alles

The Suspicious Cheese Lords got some props recently from the Washington Post (many thanks to Greg for pointing out the article, which I missed). Quoth the Post’s reviewer, “The Suspicious Cheese Lords are a men’s chamber chorus founded in 1996 that’s beginning to make a name for itself in this area — for its singing as much as its odd appellation. And in a well-researched concert of mostly Renaissance music at the Franciscan Monastery in Northeast Washington on Sunday, they showed off the sort of blend accomplished only by careful listening.”

She also called the group’s name a “clever bastardization,” which is perhaps the most apt description of the group that I’ve heard yet.

Alas, I’m still waiting on the new CDs. I’m beginning to think that they’ll have to be Epiphany presents rather than being under the tree on the 25th…

Adventures in design

While I was once an avid amateur typographer (I would never dare call myself a graphic artist), these days I touch my design program about once a year. Yes, it’s holiday card time again…

This card started with a photo—my snow photo—and built outward from there. That wasn’t the problem; it was the type. Specifically, Mac OS X’s built in Font Book. Which would be an industrial strength font management tool, were it not for its propensity to drop my 1GHz PowerBook G4 to its knees when adding (or enabling, or disabling) more than one font at a time. You know this Apple training web page where it says, “or drag an entire folder full of fonts into Font Book to add them”? It is to laugh. Har-de-har-har. Only if you want to see the spinning beachball of death for up to five minutes at a time.

On the plus side, once I had my fonts in Font Book, it was a snap to preview them until I found the right script font for the cover, drop caps, and tag line of my card. on the minus side, I spent most of my four-hour waiting room sojourn at the Volkswagen dealership getting my font collection straightened out.

Then I found a printer. Since I didn’t want to repeat last year’s card printing disaster (Kinkos color copies—cost more than my universal remote), I started calling printing companies. And amazingly found one that was not only reasonably priced, but allowed me to print the file directly to them over the Internet. Very cool, and it turned out great.