08:30 Sure someone has already post this but: Debate in one minute tinyurl.com/4c9eek #

15:55 I hate FileZilla. Its interface is the latest and greatest if this was 1996. Since it’s 2008, it sucks. #

18:16 Trying Fetch but I’m cheap. #

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10:32 In a re-org meeting – I’ll get my boots. #

21:04 Working on DLR Halloween photo tour thingie. #

21:09 Conspiracy theory: Palin dropped from ticket, Lieberman brought in, GOP numbers soar. Plan all along? #

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15:57 Giants beat Dodgers in game 162. Cy Young for Lincecum! #

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Basic Instructions is a very funny Web comic I originally found when Dilbert creator Scott Adams started working with the artist to improve the strip’s commercial appeal. There’s an associated news/updates blog, and today’s entry in Basic Instructions News includes the following:

One advantage to living in Orlando is that there’s an abundance of fireworks. I got to see a display at one of the local theme parks the other night that was a tribute to the cultures of the world and how they interplay with each other. The show began with a mammoth fireball that caused an uncomfortable amount of heat from hundreds of feet away. The grand finale was a giant globe cracking apart and exploding in a shower of sparks.

I don’t think I took away the message that the show’s creators had hoped I would.

I always thought pretty much the same thing.

12:44 Google opposes Prop 8: tinyurl.com/4pbetm #

15:22 At *$ before shopping. #

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11:28 What is the cheapest .com registrar? Lower than 7.99? #

12:48 Lunch time. Grilled cheese & turkey sandwich while trying to ignore CNN on caf_ TV. #

18:48 I guess if you have no actual solutions, lies and more lies is one strategy. #

19:45 Overall no real "winner" if a debate can be said to have one. Didn’t care for McCain’s condescending attitude. #

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11:37 Still doesn’t know what MILK is. #

12:39 Has anyone reading this ever seen a dog exhibited at the Disneyland petting zoo? #

14:24 Anyone else still subconciously expect the Letterman intro to include "The World’s Most Dangerous Band"? Or am I old? #

16:24 Damn eels, get out of my internets! #

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09:38 Free copy of "House of Leaves" up for grabs. First to ask gets it. #

11:44 Loving the new P!nk song "So What" #

13:07 I don’t buy it. There’s something else going on. "Suspending" is what primary losers do when they run out of money. #

13:36 Annoyed at Bluetooth. Could be headphones, could be computer, either way it’s sucking. #

15:49 successfully "forgot" about weekly staff meeting #

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I’d never heard of House of Leaves, but after this XKCD cartoon and a forum comment explaining it, I decided it sounded intriguing and found a copy at Borders. It was a larger book than I’d somehow expected — over 700 pages in trade paperback, including numerous (very numerous) footnotes, asides, introductions and appendices. The book is multi-layered tale of a drug-addicted tattoo parlor assistant who finds an unpublished dissertation at the home of a dead man. The dissertation is a book-length review of a movie, “The Navidson Record”. From the narrator’s words it’s clear that this movie never existed, so it’s unclear why the old man wrote so much about a nonexistent film. The review itself is quite scholarly in tone, with numerous footnotes, quotes and references. It’s then further footnoted and edited by the narrator, whose subscripted asides quickly develop into an entirely different story. Or is it so different?

In the end, or after least at page 200 or so, it doesn’t matter. The narrator is plainly losing his mind as he edits and annotates the review, and the author’s M.O. of constant footnotes and backreferences quickly grows tiring. At first I admired the denseness of this book, comparing it to GEB in terms of the level of thought and concentration required to grasp the overall narration. I eventually realized that unlike GEB, it’s not sublime; it’s just pretentious. I gave up in disgust around page 200 and am now offering the book to the first person who asks.

I realize this quickie review doesn’t really do the book justice, either as a legitimate review of the author’s obvious effort or as a clear enumeration of why it annoyed me so much that I committed the usually-unpardonable sin of discarding it before finishing. The Publisher’s Weekly review on Amazon might help:

Danielewski’s eccentric and sometimes brilliant debut novel is really two novels, hooked together by the Nabokovian trick of running one narrative in footnotes to the other. One-the horror story-is a tour-de-force. Zampano, a blind Angelino recluse, dies, leaving behind the notes to a manuscript that’s an account of a film called The Navidson Report. In the Report, Pulitzer Prize-winning news photographer Will Navidson and his girlfriend move with their two children to a house in an unnamed Virginia town in an attempt to save their relationship. One day, Will discovers that the interior of the house measures more than its exterior. More ominously, a closet appears, then a hallway. Out of this intellectual paradox, Danielewski constructs a viscerally frightening experience. Will contacts a number of people, including explorer Holloway Roberts, who mounts an expedition with his two-man crew. They discover a vast stairway and countless halls. The whole structure occasionally groans, and the space reconfigures, driving Holloway into a murderous frenzy. The story of the house is stitched together from disparate accounts, until the experience becomes somewhat like stumbling into Borges’s Library of Babel. This potentially cumbersome device actually enhances the horror of the tale, rather than distracting from it. Less successful, however, is the second story unfolding in footnotes, that of the manuscript’s editor, (and the novel’s narrator), Johnny Truant. Johnny, who discovered Zampano’s body and took his papers, works in a tattoo parlor. He tracks down and beds most of the women who assisted Zampano in preparing his manuscript. But soon Johnny is crippled by panic attacks, bringing him close to psychosis. In the Truant sections, Danielewski attempts an Infinite Jest-like feat of ventriloquism, but where Wallace is a master of voices, Danielewski is not. His strength is parodying a certain academic tone and harnessing that to pop culture tropes. Nevertheless, the novel is a surreal palimpsest of terror and erudition, surely destined for cult status. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It’s a best-seller. Obviously some people get more out of it than I did. That’s why I’m offering it free to the first person who asks. You pay shipping or arrange to meet.

09:12 It’s a bleh kind of morning. Glad I have coffee. #

12:52 Lunch & washing the car. #

14:06 Today best so far summed up: tinyurl.com/4eeknu (I’m the one giving the lesson) #

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Mega congratulations to colleency and Obi-Shawn for their first prize & Best In Show at the LA County Fair!

From Consumerist: How To Write To Congress:

Writing to Congress is the single best way to express your view on public policy. The average consumer has a surprising ability to influence legislation by crafting a well written missive. Let’s find out what the common mistakes to avoid are, how the process works, and the best ways to ensure your letter has the greatest impact.

The article continues with specific suggestions on writing your letter, how to format it so it will be read, and where to send it to be read by the right person.

10:27 At least Dell has decent teardown instruction for their laptops on their Web site. #

10:34 On chat line with Sprint, getting spurious charge removed from bill. #

11:26 45 minutes on "chat": completely useless. Five minutes on the phone: solved. Doh! #

14:11 Strange Windows thing of the day: XP in Virtual PC; colon/semicolon key acts like tilde/backquote key. Tilde/backquote key inactive. ? #

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Environment: Windows XP, SP3 with all current patches, running in Virtual PC.

Problem: colon/semicolon key acts like tilde/backquote key. Tilde/backquote key is inactive. No apparent way to type a colon or semicolon. Sometimes, but not always, goes away on reboot.

Anyone ever heard of this? I don’t even know where to start searching for solutions.

14:27 Recoding LWoMP & updated Adv. Club promo for MouseStation. #

18:04 Sadly throwing in the towel on Linux on Dell laptop. Couldn’t ever get docking station to work. Reinstalling XP. #

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15:37 I’ve been ionized! #

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10:09 Paying bills. (Arr!) #

10:34 Finished bills, finished Friday "Box of Kittens" update, did some actual work. Arr! #

15:33 Waiting for this day to be over. Is it over yet? (Arr!) #

16:47 Attn: Guy who thinks I report to him though I don’t. Thanks, I really appreciate being scheduled to start an hour’s work at 5pm on Friday. #

19:26 Home, watching Countdown & eating melon. Exciting, huh? #

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So in Ant, properties set when calling a subtarget from the “depends” clause of a target are accessible to the parent target, but properties set when calling a target with “antcall” are not. Gotcha. That means I had to change this:

to this:

The upshot of which is that my “depends” line gets unmanageably long as I add supported versions, and I call each and every one of the setPathsFor targets. Is there a better way to do this?

09:02 Thursday = work from home. Laundry, errands, misc housework and a bit of actual work as well. #

15:14 Feeling sick. F**king Taco Bell substituted steak for chicken & I didn’t notice until I’d already taken a bite or two. #

15:38 VMWare Fusion 2.0 free update for 1.x users: www.vmware.com/download/fusion/ #

17:37 Um, okay. #

19:28 Trapped in Costco. Save me! #

20:32 Legal question: Isn’t refusing to comply with a subpoena considered "contempt of court" and subject to imprisonment? #

21:30 Trying out Twidget, a Twitter widget for OS X Dashboard. #

21:44 The winner seems to be "Twitgit", confusingly similar spelling but better interface. #

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11:53 New version of Google Maps Mobile includes Street View, walking directions: tinyurl.com/5xvgzb #

14:00 Read DFW’s "Shipping Out" aka "A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again" over lunch. www.harpers.org/#hbc-90003557 #

15:09 Meeting I’d hoped to avoid. Save me! #

15:11 Completely illegible powerpoints, I might add. #

15:11 Powerpoints from the most boringest person in the room. #

15:21 Why are you talking to a room full of engineers about demographics and market segmentation? #

17:58 Damn I’m good. Going home now — wish me luck! #

21:28 Well THAT sucked. (Homeowners Association meeting) #

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Roses for KTLA’s Stephanie Edwards — LATimes

There’ll be no rain on the upcoming Tournament of Roses Parade for former KTLA-TV host Stephanie Edwards — at least, not figuratively.

Edwards, the veteran broadcaster who was removed from the station’s coverage of the New Year’s Day event two years ago after co-hosting for more than 25 years, will return to her familiar role on Jan. 1, 2009, station executives announced Tuesday.

“The people at the station thought it was a great idea, and Stephanie thought it was a great idea,” said station spokesman Paul Nichols.

Oddly, just this morning I was thinking about which Rose Parade coverage I would want to watch. We tried HGTV’s last year — gave up on KTLA after too much Michaela Pereira and Bob Eubanks subtly threatening to leave when his contract expired — but now we’ll be back. KTLA’s coverage is picked up by KRON-4 here in the Bay Area.

Thanks to SeanYoda for the link.

09:11 At dentist. New digital x-ray machine means no more film & instant results. #

11:43 Mac users: Opinions on Vienna RSS client? www.vienna-rss.org/vienna2.php #

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10:49 Loving the new Katy Perry single. #

13:58 Annoyed at InstallShield. #

16:45 Today has been full of fail. Is it over yet? #

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13:52 Buying Jen’s sewing machine. #

16:07 Scooba-ing the kitchen while Jen plays with her new sewing machine. It’s all about the labor-saving devices here. #

17:12 Aparrrrantly Ubuntu 8.04 on Dell 600m doesn’t play with TV connected to docking station. WhatEVER. #

17:53 Recording LWoMP. #

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14:53 Fiddling with Harmony remote settings. "Fishtank" mode turns on Amp, DVD, DVR & TV for fish on screen & chillout music. #

17:45 At Michaels getting our 42-year old Disneyland map framed. #

02:43 It was so obvious as to be almost meta by now, but Tina Fey absolutely nailed the Palin impression. #

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