Oh, my aching

The back pain from yesterday isn’t getting any better. It’s a good thing the gutters are done; I don’t think I could climb a ladder today, much less lift one.

It was at least a productive weekend. We now have:

  • A working dehumidifier in the basement, keeping watch over my books
  • A working garage door opener, thanks to the expedient of an extension cord (there are no outlets in the garage, at least not until the electrician gets here next week)
  • A formerly flaking eave (singular of eaves?) that has been scraped and primed
  • Clean gutters
  • An official place to keep the dogs’ leashes and our mittens (I cannot emphasize how happy that makes me—less the mittens than the leashes. We found a back-of-the-door ClosetMaid shelf system at Lowe’s that I installed yesterday)
  • Better light in the living room and the first-ever light in our so-far-only-used-for-storage third bedroom
  • And a new discovery: growlers from John Harvard’s Brew Pub. In the fridge we currently have a Pale Ale, their pseudo-Belgian Shakespeare’s Wit, and their new Provision Ale. Reviews forthcoming.

Also new: waking up to the sound of the radiators hissing as they got up to temperature. I finally got around to programming the thermostat, and it was nice to wake up to a slightly warmer house. Now I just have to fix my back.

Longfellow’s Wayside Inn

My aunt came into town tonight with a half-dozen relatives in tow— my first cousin once removed Esta and her husband Lou, my other first cousin once removed Barbara, my second cousin Beth… there are a lot of cousins at various degrees of removal on my mother’s side. We had dinner with them in Sudbury, at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn. Not quite as full-on traditional Yankee as Durgin Park, but close. It’s been a long time since I’ve been asked if I want mint sauce with my lamb.

I enjoyed it, though my back was screaming at me the whole meal. We had spent the day cleaning gutters, after spending part of yesterday on the ladder installing a security light, and on one of those trips up and down the ladder my back decided it had had enough.

John Robb on Kerry’s global test

John Robb thinks that Kerry lost this first debate, given that all Bush needed to do was hold Kerry to “tactical victories,” but he also provides much needed context for Kerry’s “global test” remark. At the time, I thought Kerry was just foolishly playing into right-wing paranoia about new world orders. It turns out that, according to Robb, he’s referencing part of Col. John Boyd’s “grand strategy” concept, the moral connectivity vector:

A key test of moral connectivity is proper conduct within alliances.  If a member of an alliance takes independent action that puts the other alliance members at risk, it needs to have a strong moral justification for that action.  If it fails that test, the alliance will melt away, and the independent actor will become isolated.

The post points to a fascinating article on Boyd’s strategic thought at Global Guerrillas. Thought provoking.

Win some, lose some

When you’re challenging the draconian DMCA, there are good days and bad days. Yesterday was both. On the good side, a federal judge issued a smackdown to Diebold for misusing the DMCA in trying to bully Swarthmore students into taking down links to material that was critical of Diebold’s voting machine security.

On the bad side, a St. Louis court ruled in favor of Blizzard in their DMCA suit, in which Blizzard sought to suppress the open source BnetD, a clone of Blizzard’s Battle.net service that enabled multiplayer options for Blizzard customers who didn’t want to use Battle.net.

What’s the commonality? Other than the DMCA, very little. Yesterday’s rulings in a nutshell say that the “safe harbor” clause of the act should not be misconstrued as an excuse for companies to send infinite numbers of takedowns, but the core anti-circumvention portion of the act stands. Even though the BnetD team was doing reverse engineering to enable compatibility with their free product.

Presidential debate, part IV

Interesting staking out of positions while position to the extreme facets. The president’s slipping in the World Criminal Court was telling, as was Kerry’s mention of the Kyoto Protocol.

Hmm. Good clarification from Lehrer. Bilateral vs. multilateral. Interesting clarification leaving Kerry looking slightly foolish, with Bush’s correction about “enriched uranium” vs. “plutonium.”

And here is the real point, on the Sudan: we’re overextended, straining the National Guard, holding people in who want to leave. But both candidates want to answer questions on Iran rather than the Sudan.

I think Kerry was a little overconfident, slipping “Mission Accomplished” into his reply on Korea and Russia. His closing is OK—not a barnraiser, but it is after all a debate moderated by Jim Lehrer. Bush: same talking points.

Post-debate spin: Giuliani gets checked by Tom Brokaw on the assertion of the leader of Pakistan that the war made things worse by America, not better, but calls Bush’s stalling on the same two talking points a “strength.”

Presidential debate, part III

The sum of the President’s point right now appears to be, “Don’t change horses in mid-stream. We won’t succeed if we send mixed signals to the world.”

Hmm. A free Iraq and a free Afghanistan will send a powerful signal. Hard to get to that signal if we are losing ground there daily.

Did Bush’s prep people give him any points other than “Wrong war, wrong time” and “grand diversion”?

The enemy attacked us, and I’m committing troops…in Iraq. Where the enemy wasn’t. Oh, and let’s slip “mixed messages” into our reply.

Good of Kerry to pounce on Bush’s slip there.

Presidential debate, part II

Homeland security. I think this could be the hidden strength of Kerry. This is the untold story of the Bush presidency—the strong emphasis on homeland security while adding no funding. Bush: “How are you going to pay for all those promises?” Hmm. Perhaps by not slashing taxes on the rich and the corporations. Bush sounds like an imbecile by comparison to the senator.

—What the hell? “We’ll never succeed until the Iraqis take responsibility for protecting themselves.” Is that a cover signal to the gun lobby—here’s a new market? A free Iraq is essential for the security of this country. True, now.

Interlude: New York Times is also live-blogging.

Kerry let Bush get away with the $87 billion again. Probably again wise to not try to explain the fine points of how Congress works in a 30 second rebuttal.

First debate impressions

Watching on NBC, who are getting around the “no cutaway” rule by doing splitscreen reaction shots of the candidates. Meaning that Bush shared the screen with Kerry the whole time that Kerry was speaking, while Bush had the screen to himself during the response. But it looks like they’re keeping it fair by doing split screens for the initial respondent to each question.

Second question, about the reprehensible comments of Cheney about the safety of the country should Kerry be elected. Bush ducks by saying that’s not going to happen and refuses to answer the question, which Lehrer lets him do. But Kerry zings him on the rebuttal about the diversion in Iraq—then bobbles it with his military referrals—then makes an allegation about outsourcing the fight for Bin Laden.

Third question. Anyone else notice how Bush is a frowner, not a smirker, when he’s waiting to respond? Was Saddam ten times more important than Bin Laden? Rebuttal: flip-flop allegation.

Interjection: DNC fact checkers fact checking the RNC fact checkers, here.

Hmm, in the fourth question, Bush said, “Saddam Hussein,” then mumbled and corrected himself, “Osama Bin Laden.”

Bush’s response? “Flip flop.” Kerry, wisely, isn’t trying to explain the nuances of his decisions, which I don’t think are flip flops; he’s driving on the fact that this was a mistaken decision by the president.

Autumn in Arlington

scudding clouds above our house

I took the bus for the first time yesterday, going toward Kendall Square (via a change to the T at Harvard Square) to meet Lisa after work. She and I went to John Harvard’s for a quick burger and beer and to pick up a couple growlers of her favorite Pale Ale.

On the way I shot a couple photos of the water tower at Park Circle, just a block or so from our house, taking advantage of the first clear skies in a few days. This morning I shot some more photos, including my first Lensday entry. I don’t plan to make this a regular occurrence, but thought it would be fun.

Anyway, autumn: not crisp yet (still too soggy from the last few storms), and not too many turning trees, but beautiful anyway.

And in the “it’s about time” department…

A federal judge has ruled that key parts of the PATRIOT Act, those provisions which grant extended surveillance powers to the FBI and impose gag orders on those who receive subpoenas to turn over records, are unconstitutional. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

I’d just like to pause for a second, as tonight’s first Presidential debate looms, and place my own bet on the least likely question to be asked George Bush: “Can you reconcile recent court rulings declaring major parts of the PATRIOT Act unconstitutional, as well as recent court challenges to the holding of uncharged ‘enemy combatants,’ with your oath to protect and defend the Constitution? If not, why should we vote for you for a second term? Shouldn’t we be prosecuting you instead?

Comforting

It’s good to see that, after back to back hurricanes have dumped more water on Virginia than during almost any season in memory, the Bush Administration has decided to prevent ten environmental disasters waiting to happen by scrapping ten of the “Ghost Fleet” ships in the James River. In an article about the disposal contracts for the last four ships, the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote four paragraphs that had a chilling edge for this former Hampton Roads resident:

… the National Defense Reserve Fleet, which holds ships designated as being useful for defense. When the ships deteriorate, they are made available for disposal.

There are 60 such “non-retention” vessels in the Ghost Fleet.

The ships contain oil, asbestos, lead and other toxic chemicals and have been an environmental concern in Virginia for years.

A report prepared for the Maritime Administration in 2001 offered a worst-case scenario in which two ships from the Ghost Fleet break apart in a storm, spilling oil and polluting a 50-mile stretch of shoreline that includes historic Jamestown Island and various nature sanctuaries.

Having grown up seeing the Ghost Fleet anchored just a mile away from my friends’ houses and motoring or rowing past the old ships, hearing adults talk about the ships being ready to be called back into service, and looking up at the rusting hulks and wondering, it’s interesting to get the truth.

Stay of execution

It looks like I have a little while longer before I have to make a decision about shifting photo publishing platforms. The storage limit on my .Mac account just increased from 100 MB (plus 5 for mail) to 250 MB partitioned between mail and disk.

Incidentally, I have to say I’m not super impressed with Flickr so far. The upload speed was quite slow for the trial batch of 10 photos that I put up. Also one of the most potentially useful features, the Calendar, sorts photos by when they were uploaded, not when they were taken (though this may have to do with the iPhoto-to-Flickr plugin that I used to upload them). Since I just spent a long time manually correcting dates on a batch of newly digitized photos from 1998 and 1999, I was disappointed to not see those dates carry over. But I’ll continue playing with it until I find my alternative.

Reasons for alternative bourbons (or Tennessee whiskies)

Fark pointed out today that Jack Daniel’s has quietly lowered the proof of its flagship Black Label Tennessee Whiskey, from 86 to 80.

I’ll be going out tomorrow to see if there are any of the big bottles left in our local liquor stores—at 86 proof. And I might even sign a petition

In the meantime, these other fine bourbons and Tennessee whiskeys are still at their original higher proofs:

  • Labrot and Graham’s Woodford Reserve (90.4 proof)
  • Henry McKenna’s (100 proof)*
  • Knob Creek (100 proof)
  • Old Forester (86 proof)*
  • Elijah Craig (94 proof)*
  • Maker’s Mark (90 proof)
  • And, ironically, Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel (94 proof)

* Have not personally tried but have heard they’re good.

Quick-n-easy image resizing, two ways

I had been meaning to cobble together a quick script to do automatic image resizing (occasionally the images that Amazon provides for album covers or book jackets are larger than the standard sizes I use on the site, and I always want to resize album covers to 65 pixels tall), but was scared off by GraphicConverter’s AppleScript dictionary, which indicated I had to specify a scaling factor rather than an absolute pixel height. Today on MacOSXHints someone saved me the trouble, providing (a) a sample script that uses the built in Image Events application to do the scaling and (b) a link to information about a command line tool called sips that accomplishes the same thing.

North End meets Hollywood

A week or two ago, I was on my way up Salem Street to our favorite 24-hour bakery in the North End, Bova’s, when I noticed that traffic was even worse than usual in front of the door and there were some seriously bright lights. I went inside and asked the lady at the counter what was going on. She said they were filming location shots for a movie to be called “Fever Pitch.” Apparently Jimmy Fallon’s character, the obsessed Red Sox fan, lives above the bakery in the movie, and Drew Barrymore’s character buys a cannoli there—from the lady I was talking to.

I took my bread and turned to go. She was already telling the next customer, “Yeah, I sold Drew Barrymore a cannoli the other day!!”

All I could think was, Tony Pierce’s Drew-obsessed friend Ashley would totally freak out over this news.

I went back last Friday and the street was back to normal. “No Hollywood today,” I commented to the lady inside. She nodded and said, “They might be back, but right now they’re reconstructing the street corner in Canada somewhere.”

“At least they’ll have better parking there,” I said.