He began his midnight creep

While we were in the garden last Saturday, Lisa noted large holes dug in the back bed, larger than you might expect from a squirrel. “Maybe it’s a cat,” I offered.

“Looks too big to be a cat,” she said grimly.

I thought it was destined to stay a mystery, but Sunday night after dinner with Ed and Gina we were sitting around the dining room table talking. Then Gina said, “Oh, you have a raccoon!” pointing out our skywall into the darkness.

I saw a naked pointed snout and said, “That’s no raccoon. It’s a possum.”

Sure enough, as we watched him, he went into the back bed where the holes were. He was huge, at least a foot tall at the shoulder, and not particularly afraid of the light either. At least until we got a flashlight, at which point he unhurriedly vanished into the bushes.

Unfortunately I didn’t think to get a picture. Sigh. At least now I know what’s been digging in the side lawn.

Free RSS aggregator at MSDN

Dare Obasanjo has published sample C# code and an EXE at the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) for an RSS news aggregator. To my surprise, it does some interesting things like importing OPML subscription lists. It also seems to handle both RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 feeds, and has some neat tricks like browsing directly in the aggregator (why not if you’re embedding IE?).

NetNewsWire it isn’t. In fact, it’s not quite up to Radio’s standards either. There are some definite GUI issues, like not remembering the width of columns and not being able to resize any of the panes in the main window; no delete confirmation for subscriptions; no memory of read items between updates; and calling the “mark all as read” option “Catch Up” (logical, but I was expecting something consistent with all the other email, news, and RSS apps I’ve seen). But it is free, and for all you C# hackers out there it gives good sample code.

Now if only MSDN would add an RSS feed…

DC Blogger Map

Bill Turner at BrilliantCorners points to the DC Subway Blogger Map. I still haven’t seen one for Boston, but of course mapping anything onto the tangled mass that is the Boston T would be tricky. Plus all the college kids would probably have had to choose between locating their blog at their college’s T station or their home one. (For me, that would have been between Kendall on the Red Line and Government Center on the Green.)

And of course we’ll never see a map like that in Seattle, because there’s no subway and the bus system is too boring. Oh well. We still have GeoURL.

Gibson: Subway paranoia hits Tokyo

William Gibson points to a Tokyo newspaper article about supposed secret tunnels under Tokyo: “AKIRA-inflected secret city beneath Tokyo; retired construction workers whispering about the diamond-cutter required to tunnel existing concrete, when the maps show nothing but soil should have been there…”

Gibson also notes “subway fantasy is a genre unto itself.” Hard not to be when there’s so much disused or abandoned infrastructure just out of sight, just around the corner. I used to be fascinated by the glimpses of old platforms or entire disused lines you could see in Boston on the Green and Red Lines. There are, as you might imagine, dozens of sites about the phenomenon, including this one on New York and this one on Boston. There’s a master list here.

Shaming myself into finishing books

To point 3, I finally made myself finish Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s funny to think that I have some prior art for that book, written in 1993, that talks about how the Internet (which for me consisted of Usenet, IRC, and email) has its own semiotics, where words to signify new identities. Eight years later, after the .com boom bubbled and popped, David Weinberger argues that even the Web is largely a creation of our words, in spite of the efforts of folks like the Audblog people.

I still have hard copies of the issue of the short-lived undergraduate research journal Aleph in which the paper was published, but no soft copies of the paper. I’ll have to dig up the paper and re-key it.

Minor site changes

I’ve added a section of the site that I update with some current reading and listening links. Yes, it’s an Amazon promotion. No, I won’t ever make any money from it. I’m mostly just interested in

  1. sharing what I’m listening to
  2. keeping track (you can click the fleurons under each listing to see past entries)
  3. shaming myself into reading more often

A promising arrival: Johnathon Levengood

Add my voice to Esta’s congratulating my cousin Catherine and her husband Jeremy on the birth of their first child, a boy; and to my grandfather on becoming a great-grandfather (not that he wasn’t already. Ba-dum-pssh!). I’m definitely going to have to plan another East Coast sweep in June when I go out for the Sloan reunion so Lisa and I can meet little “Chonnie.”

Updated 3/5/2003: Okay, I got the name wrong (now corrected). It is in honor of my uncle, but it’s Johnathon, not John. And apparently they don’t want to use diminutives (which I can understand), so “Chonnie” is out. After this post.

Either another astroturf, or worse

I expected some commentary on the Daisy Lundy problem, but not total denial. That’s what this comment writer gave in my discussion:

And how do we know that this attack even occurred as claimed. The entire investigation is based upon Daisy Lundy’s word alone.

-The relatively minor injuries suffered by Ms. Lundy (no black eyes despite allegedly being slammed into the steering wheel forcefully, no other marks/scratches around the face, broken bones or wounds; leaving open the possibility of self infliction or having a friend do it with reluctance, so as not to cause serious physical harm).

-The absence of vandalism to her vehicle (if someone were lying in wait, they could very well have tires slashed/car doors keyed as a threat or act of intimidation, however this was not done).

-The unusual circumstances of their encounter (how would her whereabouts away from her own residence be known at 2 am and how could someone lurk around her car for potentially several hours in cold weather without being noticed and reported to the police as a prowler/potential rapist by concerned residents).

I was at first stunned. Who could even believe that Daisy Lundy would blow out her own knee, I thought. Then I remembered something I had read on the Sabre discussion of the attacks. Sure enough, the exact same points (word for word) are made here. This combined with the similarly abusive stuff discussed at WahooPundit suggests that there’s someone who’s really threatened by the thought that people care about what happened to Daisy Lundy.

Saturday: flipping a switch

I opened my eyes yesterday to brilliant light streaming in the window. Lisa said to me, “We need to get up. It’s 11:30.” Startled I rolled out of bed and into the shower quickly, then came down to cook breakfast. A minute later Lisa said, “I need to fix my watch; it’s still on East Coast time.” Nothing like getting three hours back at the start of your day to really make you want to be productive.

So we were. After breakfast we got out into the yard. Lisa swept the patio and started weeding the back beds (where we are starting to see our first flowers). I took a hacksaw to the ten foot long pine branch that we lost in a windstorm in January. Then I mowed the grass and helped Lisa dig up some of the garden beds and cover them to kill any remaining weeds.

Afterwards we went downtown and walked by the water. It was amazing after so many dark months how choked with people the sidewalks were. It was just as though someone had flipped a switch and turned the town back on.

Today of course it’s raining and chilly. Gotta love the Northwest.

Worst novel ever

My friend and fellow Virginia alum Tim Fox (who, for the love of God, needs to start his own weblog), emailed a link to the “harshest author interview ever”, of possibly the worst novel ever published:

I am on the phone with Robert Burrows, author of the recently published political novel Great American Parade. This book has sold only 400 copies nationwide, and Burrows seems flabbergasted to be hearing from me. The most prestigious newspaper to have shown any interest so far is the Daily Student at Indiana University.

I tell Burrows that if he is willing to submit to an interview, I am willing to review his book at length in The Washington Post. The only catch, I said, is that I am going to say that it is, in my professional judgment, the worst novel ever published in the English language.

Silence.

“My review will reach 2 million people,” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

Update: Metafilter already caught it. Hysterical commentary, though not as funny as the original review.

Music this weekend

Two quick updates:

  1. Tara reminded me that Folk Implosion are playing the Crocodile on Sunday night. Go forth and lo-fi. I’d go but I have a feeling I’ll be too tired from:
  2. The Cascadian Chorale’s War and Peace concert, at St. Thomas Episcopal in Medina. Tickets here or at the door. Program will include classical and contemporary reflections on war, including:

Go forth and enjoy.

Creative Commons and Blogging

As I always suspected, blogs look like they will provide a wealth of fodder for grad studies—mostly, in my opinion, because we talk so much about ourselves and our processes. My decision to license my blog under Creative Commons appears to have set in motion a paper proposal in a grad intellectual property class. I’ve let CyborgWoman know she can ping me for material as she needs it. I wonder who else is out there doing this other than Greg and Doc.

Watching Buffy

Confession: I’ve been diving into Buffy this week, particularly the second season. Hey, it was on sale at Costco. And while I’m saddened by the revelation that Ms. Gellar will be leaving the show, it’s still a tremendous body of work.

Talking with Greg the other night, he confessed to never having been much of a fan—never having watched it at all, in fact. I would suggest that it has to be taken in the right spirit—as a potent allegory of the struggle to grow up, to gain power over one’s fears, to face one’s demons. And once you can watch it on that level and still appreciate the camp and the humor, you’ll be hooked.

The Tin Man has been watching it much more closely, and he’s annotated most of season 7. He’s been looking at some of the other big themes: redemption, sexuality, power and powerlessness. And of course kicking ass.

Other Buffy fans out there: Julie Powell, who appears to be more than ready for the series to end in spite of being hooked on it. And Esta, who has the right perspective.