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Justin du Coeur
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| ... to take advantage of the federal stimulus plan, is clearly to be the person selling signs that read, "Grooved Pavement Ahead"... | ||||||
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Tonight's outing was to The Wrathskellar, the latest production by the Babydolls -- it was quite neat and rather different from the usual. The show is deliberately darker than Babydolls norm, downright Brechtian at times, although still leavened by the usual humor. It was made up of the current Babydolls core (minus Betty, who was sadly on the DL), and everyone did a fine job. Some highlights included:
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| We headed home after the event as has become our tradition. Rather than rushing back down route 95, which would potentially be three hours of stressy driving and maybe jams, we spent nine hours wandering our way down Route 1. We ran a few minutes late, but managed to slide into Azure Cafe about five minutes before they really filled up for lunch. The Azure was originally an accidental discovery on the way to LL Bean's -- it's about two blocks away from the main Bean's store -- but has since become our main reason to go to Freeport. It's a lovely little cafe, with a big porch for al fresco dining on nice days. We love to take one of the tables on the edge and watch the world pass by as we have our fishcakes. Anyway, after that we wandered gradually along, shopping as we went. Highlights include a new leather jacket from Wilson Leather clearance sale (a really lovely Calvin Klein bomber jacket, marked down from Idiotically Expensive to Fairly Reasonable); a small assortment from Wicked Whoopies (a bakery that specializes in a wide variety of whoopies pies, which I saw on Phantom Gourmet years ago and have been curious about ever since); and bunch of books from Harding's, a very good used bookstore in Wells (mostly from their currently-very-good Occult section -- I got a transcription of works of John Dee, a decent-looking history of the Tarot, and a selection of quotes from Ambrose Bierce, misfiled in Occult because it was titled "Ambrose Bierce's Satanic Quotations"). In general, I was left with a determination to find a nice weekend sometime to just wander back up Route 1, check out some restaurants, window-shop in some antiqueries, hit some mini-golf courses, and generally relax. On a weekend like this, where you can leave the windows down and just mosey along, it's remarkably pleasant... | ||||||
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So this weekend was GNE, and it was generally lovely. The weather was fabulous, at least by this year's standards -- low humidity, decent heat, and the only real rain was a few showers Saturday evening and rain overnight. Had lots of fun with lots of activities, but really mostly lazed this weekend. The major project was helping a bit with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} svava's Whim Tourney. This was a piece of delicious silliness, and quite a bit of fun for everyone. It was a round-robin tournament (since there were only ten entrants), and in each round the combatant was given two daggers. In order to earn a better weapons form, their consort had to answer a trivia question. Questions were drawn from both SCA and real history and culture, and were broken down into "easy", "medium" and "in case Katherine Stanhope enters". So we spent a fair bit of the morning shooting the breeze with marysdress (who was organizing the questions), and tossing ideas at her. Of course, most of our questions were harder than we expected -- the danger of a bunch of old-timers trying to define an "easy" question, and generally not taking "standing in front of a crowd" brain freeze into account. But it generally went fine, because answering the questions accurately was far less important than amusing Svava, and they were very generous in accepting answers: a Good answer was at least as appropriate as a Right one.Anyway, if the consort's answer was accepted (which it was about 80% of the time), they got to reach into The Bag of Weapons, and choose a weapons form at random. But of course, half of them weren't simple things like "Sword and Shield" or "Spear". Instead, there were things like "Spear Wrestling" (which overrode what other weapons forms were chosen), "Dizzy Sword" (one-sword, but you have to spin around it five times before the bout starts), and the crowd favorite, "T-Rex". The latter was nice and straightforward, except that each fighter's arms were bungee corded to their body. Polearm worked poorly, spear not *too* badly. No one wound up trying two-sword, which is too bad only in that it probably would have been remarkably funny. (Fortunately, everyone grasped that winning was *not* the point of this tournament.) Aside from that, the weekend was a bit of everything: a little shopping here, some hanging out with friends there, my share of the Thrown Weapons throw, a couple of hours at the Carolingian encampment at the engagement party for rising_moon and dreda, lots of time hanging out with Lochleven, and generally a good mellow time. The event was a tad crowded (last year was ~750 people; this year cracked 1000 and kept going), but nonetheless a *lot* of fun, and just what I needed... | ||||||
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| [Yes, the two of us have a fondness for a few of the contest shows. For ages, ladysprite has been extolling the virtues of So You Think You Can Dance -- since she's someone we trust on the subject of dance, we actually paid attention and started recording it from the beginning this time around. I now understand what she's been talking about: the reality-TV aspects aside, this show features an astonishing variety and quality of dance. To get into the competition, you basically have to be as good as the professionals on Dancing With the Stars, and you have to get better in order to survive. By this point, halfway through, the dancing is pretty much as good as I see anywhere, and it's delightful to see such a willingness to try *every* dance form, not just the traditional or fashionable. So, with that said:] Yes, yes -- it's unambiguous that Janette and Brandon are the best couple: they are rarely short of perfect, and were certainly excellent tonight. But damn: that "addiction" piece had me downright teary-eyed with its sheer power. So Kayla and Kupono get my call tonight: I want to see them get a chance to continue, and I'm not especially worried that we're going to lose either Brandon or Janette. (Indeed, at this point I think they have pole position to win...) | ||||||
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| The geekerati are long familiar with the notion that Emacs is an operating system masquerading as a text editor. Now, in one of those periodic reminders that Microsoft Research is the most interesting part of the company, comes this article about their Gazelle project, which takes seriously the notion of Web browser as OS. (Thanks to All About Microsoft for the link.) From the sound of things, they're going in a direction rather similar to where Chrome wound up, but with a more deliberate abstraction: not merely that browser windows should be process-separated from each other, but that the Web browser is, more and more, behaving like an operating system, so it's about time we start treating it like one. So they've taken all the classic concepts about separation of principals and such, and explored where you wind up when you build a browser on those assumptions. Neat-sounding project. Like most things from MSR, it's explicitly not a product, nor a product-to-be: this is just an exploratory research project. But most of MSR's better idea gradually seep their way into Windows in one form or another, so don't be surprised to see this abstraction under the hood of some future release of IE. (Possibly -- knowing MS' product side -- in a form just broken enough to compromise its rather good ideas...) | ||||||
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| Okay, note for self: they manage the Fourth of July celebration a *lot* more aggressively nowadays than they used to. We wandered over to the Esplanade side of things for the first half, on the theory that there were more options for dinner and better people-watching. (Which is a major part of the point for us: it's fascinating to watch the remarkable variety of people who come out for the Fourth.) The weather was utterly spectacular, almost worth paying the price of two weeks of drear that it took us to get there. And we wandered close enough to the Shell to be on the outskirts of the mob for Neil Diamond's first set, which was rather fun -- lots of energy (if a tad too much drunkenness). The "food court", we discovered, was *directly* underneath the flyby, close enough to clearly see the afterburners of the jets. But when we headed back at intermission, to take our traditional fireworks position somewhere around 200 Smoots, we found ourselves stymied: the National Guard were there, with barricades, insisting that the bridge was Full Dammit, and they weren't going to allow anyone else onto it. Of course, this presumably safety-related concern was resulting in a mob scene worthy of the best disaster movies, but we eventually managed to escape the solid crowd, and wandered off -- slightly annoyed at having our plans foiled, but enjoying the evening air too much to get really cranky about it. In the end, we wound up finding a perch in the middle of the road, in the far lanes of Storrow Drive: there was a break in the trees, and the crowd wasn't too terrible. This turned out to be a fine location -- just close enough to a sound tower to partly hear the music, which isn't usually possible on the bridge. (Sweet Caroline turned out to be a remarkably effective shibboleth for determining who the Sox fans in the audience were: I'm not sure which could be heard further away, the fireworks or the cries of, "So good! So good! So good!") And the position was *perfect* for the fireworks. We were essentially in the middle of the barge, which was parked parallel to us in mid-river. They were as spectacular as always -- indeed, they felt rather like a big F*** You to the recession, giving no ground to the economy. Delightful, energizing, and bloody damned *loud* from where we were. Took us an hour to get back to our car afterwards (we felt no need to rush into the crowds, so we paused for soft ice cream on the way), but eminently worthwhile: one of the best Fourths we've been to, despite not being quite what we expected... | ||||||
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| I was afraid that, a dozen days later, my "this ought to work" veggie chili would be an undifferentiated mass of goo, but not so: it actually keeps nearly as well as serious beef chili. This dish was actually the result of the Sharepoint conference I went to (SPTechCon), a week ago Monday. The conference was, frankly, pretty disappointing: while I learned a bit, I got about half an hour's worth of education out of each of the three-hour workshops I took there. One of the sessions was too disorganized; the other was well-enough done, but less relevant than I'd been hoping for. If I'd paid my own money, I would have been downright annoyed -- as it was, I was mostly cranky about losing an entire day of work without enough to show for it. But *lunch* was surprisingly good. The conference was held at The Ziggurat -- the Marriott on Mem Drive where Arisia resides nowadays. They had opened up an innocuous door next to the escalator, which led into a corridor I'd never seen before, leading to an airy pavilion they'd set up outside -- one of those big affairs with big plastic domed "windows", looking rather like a Victorian glass house. I and my co-worker Bob sat and ate a rather good lunch with a bunch of other engineers, commiserating about how much Sharepoint sucks for serious work. And the centerpiece of the meal was a quite good vegetarian chili, which left me with a bad case of, "That was tasty *and* healthy. Surely I can do that." So a day or two later, I did. Of course, like so many of my dishes, this was more thrown together than designed. But for my reference and your consideration, the basics( behind the cut ) | ||||||
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| [One of this weekend's projects is to do a fast skim through LJ, and try to get caught up. One thing about my new job is that, while I'm not working terribly insane hours, I am working *harder* than I have in some years, and the result is that I'm reading nearly zero LJ at work, and falling rather badly behind. So here's the first of possibly a few very tardy link-repostings.] Thanks to cvirtue for the link to this utterly insane optical illusion. With most such illusions, there's a measure of "yes, that's very nice" -- I can make my eyes see the illusions, but it's just as easy not to. In this case, though, I find it damned near impossible to convince myself that it *is* an illusion -- until I covered over certain bits of the picture strategically, I was certain they were pulling my leg... | ||||||
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| A note for the web geeks out there: there is a new major rev of Firefox out. Ars Technica has a brief rundown of the major enhancements – the headline one is that video is natively supported, but IMO the more interesting note is that Javascript is now much faster, so you can write more sophisticated client-side apps. Even more interesting for the long run is the new support for native worker threads in Javascript – this has the potential to allow you to write far more powerful apps in a web page. (Yes, multithreading introduces a lot of new dangers, but they appear to have the threads wrapped in a tight message-passing architecture that should mitigate most of the usual threading risks.) | ||||||
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| [Yes, I'm still here. Suffice it to say, life is Very Very Busy at the moment. Work is stressful but interesting, and hasn't left me enough time to breathe, much less manage LJ. This will, with any luck, improve gradually.] Anyway, this weekend was the Old Songs folk festival. I think of Old Songs as "the festival that came after Fox Hollow", the formative festival that I grew up at, but I was reminded that this is the 29th year Old Songs has been running, far longer than Fox Hollow did, so it's become quite the tradition unto itself. A few impressions: The highlight of Saturday evening's concert was, no real surprise, Christine Lavin. To my astonishment, she played "What Was I Thinking?", after having played it just a few hours earlier -- Christine rarely repeats herself that quickly, so I was puzzled. Turned out, though, that this was because the afternoon show had included a quickly written verse about Governor Mark Sanford, and some Republican in the crowd had taken her to task about it afterwards, and demanded a retraction. So in "apology", Christine played it again -- replacing the offending verse with her much funnier and nastier McCain/Palin "What Was He Thinking?" verse instead. Moral of the story: never piss off a folk singer, and *especially* never piss off Christine Lavin. She will smile that sweet grin of hers and proceed to gore every ox in your herd. She followed this with "It's a Good Thing He Can't Read My Mind", and the new, frighteningly funny, dude's-view version of the song "Good Thing She Can't Read My Mind". After which, she proceeded to pull in the audience members who admitted to identifying with the song, resulting in a mammoth 30-some-odd backup band for "Sensitive New Age Guys". (Most of whom were folk singers themselves, so she got a backup band singing in harmony, no less.) The last session we got to this weekend was a difficult choice. On the one hand, Jez Lowe was performing, and he's one of my favorites. But he was up against the silliest session with the best lineup of the weekend. The topic was, "How's the Weather?", and was, indeed, songs about weather. But it consisted of Michael Cooney; Cindy Mangsen and Steve Gillette; Christine Lavin; John Roberts and Tony Barrand; and Lou and Peter Berryman. It's fair to say we'd go to almost any workshop with that lineup: it was almost a who's-who of the best folk songwriters alive today, all of whom our family has been following for decades. Anyway, the venue for that workshop appeared to be poorly chosen: it was the Dutch Barn, fully enclosed and ridiculously over-crowded. But 2/3 of the way through, it turned out to be the perfect spot: power for the entire town went out, putting out all amplification for the festival. So while most performances were suddenly hard to hear, we happened to be in the one place small enough for unamplified folk singers. (And having the power go out while they were in the middle of singing about lightning and hurricanes seemed oddly apt.) Saw huge numbers of people I knew, many of whom I hadn't expected there, ranging from Dad Kay to Baron Sallamallah. The SCAdian crossover crowd was apparently enormous: I happened to be chatting with one member of Quintavia who I hadn't seen in ten years or so, and our conversational references to "Crown Tourney" caught the attention to two random passersby, who turned out to be members of Concordia. And then, while describing the encounter to msmemory in the clothing stand a few minutes later, the girl at the next rack perked up with, "The SCA? My boyfriend was in that!". We really do seem to be everywhere.Wound up with a fair amount of shopping, of course, including rather too many CDs. I also bought two hats. First was a very cheap palm hat -- Old Songs is where I traditionally get my palm hats, because they are inexpensive and decently sturdy, so good value for the money. And then I got seduced by an absolutely beautiful leather hat, sort of a cowboy fedora. By no means free, but still an offer-you-can't-refuse price. The big purchase, though, was less of an impulse buy: at the refurbished-instrument store, I bought a mandolin. It's an instrument I've been fascinated with for years: I think it sounds really lovely, and the neck is small enough that I believe it'll be easier for my small hands than a guitar. So I have a new toy for noodling and learning -- hopefully I will persist in it long enough to get halfway decent at it... | ||||||
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| Very neat article in Ars Technica the other day, about Opera Unite -- a new service that's built into the new version of the Opera Web browser. The high concept is fairly straightforward: the browser is, itself, now a simplified web server. Once you enable it, you can turn on various plugins -- file sharing, notes, chat and so on. The resulting website is exposed via Opera's proxy servers. (That is, your website shows up as "http://mymachine.myname.operaunite.com/ The techies in the audience are probably going to react to this with a great yawn: there's nothing here that can't be done *far* more powerfully if you have half a clue. But the essence of their idea is, I suspect, that it's an order of magnitude easier to deal with, especially if you *don't* have a clue. Unlike a website you set up at a conventional end-user ISP, you're using largely your own resources, and plug in your own apps arbitrarily (?? -- remains to be seen how good the API for this is), but it requires only a minimum of technical knowledge to do so. It's a somewhat audacious gamble, and we'll see how it pays off, but it's quite a neat idea. I've always felt that the fully-distributed model was an ideal for the Web, and I find the ISP-based model of websites somewhat confining and annoying. Something like this, that lets every machine be a webserver, is much closer to that ideal. So I wish them luck. I can see all sorts of problems, ranging from security (doing this without massive security risks is hard, to say the least) to cable companies trying to mess with it (on the "your contract says you can't run a web server" argument) to simply not being enough of an improvement for anybody to care. But I'll be crossing my fingers for them, and keeping an eye out for this... | ||||||
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| [Yes, yes -- as always, I'm late to the meme. But I always like this sort of thing. Courtesy herooftheage, although I see that a lot of others have picked it up. Answering before I read other peoples' lists.] List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you: list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it. (Italicized commentary added afterwards.) 1. 1984 -- The book that scarred me and influenced my thinking more than any other. That was made even worse by reading It Can't Happen Here shortly after: the two books synergize scarily. 2. The 21 Balloons -- A young reader's book that isn't nearly well enough known. 3. I, Robot -- Okay, in retrospect Foundation probably made more of an impression, but this was the first to come to mind. I was a big Asimov fan as a young teen. 4. The Tripods trilogy -- Detecting my fondness for paranoid SF? 5. The Warrior's Apprentice -- Not the best of the Vorkosigan books, but delightful. 6. The Humanoids -- Completed the path started by 1984. One of the creepiest books I've ever read. 7. Francis Willughby's Book of Games -- Gotta get some SCA-topical stuff in here, and this is my absolute favorite on games. 8. Illuminatus! -- The reason I became a Mason. Seriously. 9. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator -- Arguably my very favorite book of my childhood. 10. Sandman -- Have to include *some* graphic novel. 11. Orchesography -- Not the best period dances, but the best period book *about* dance. 12. Inferno -- I *adore* it, and have many editions, although I am especially fond of the down-to-earth Ciardi translation. (Especially the footnotes, which appeal to the student of politics in me.) 13. Amphigory -- I wanted a humor book; I'm curiously amused that this was the first one to come to mind. 14. Inherit the Wind -- One of my two or three favorite plays, and one that made an especially deep impression. 15. To Your Scattered Bodies Go -- Okay, no, I don't know why. But it did stick with me: indeed, that slang "Yaas" I use so often comes directly from Mark Twain in the Riverworld series. Not by any means a deep list of the books that made the deepest impressions on me, but not a bad off-the-cuff collection of ones that have made a real impact... | ||||||
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| Got this spam on the SCA Questions list the other day. I haven't the slightest clue what they are thinking, nor even what language a few of these words are supposed to be from, but man -- I can *so* see confusing a poetry slam with a dramatic reading. (The combination of punctuation and repeated words just *makes* it as performance art, not to mention that a bunch of lines are more or less iambic.) potboy baboo nopal. lives grouch gooey budge! cashew chalk coatee oakery? potion alb feel bay. mix give scamp. pupa blase. pawn sin. oakery estop reflux wen? bled sin tops cashew. fully cooker swathe nimbus! alb fully glover. smelt brazil public penes. gasper reflux pink sap. sniffy ape nimbus gypsa. fiber cashew rococo agile? tempi sap elan grouch! slam public. chose moving alb rococo. estop lives. luting nimbus valuer rococo? gird seer nimbus hubby! moving shrink large. pant acuity luting wen? arise alb nopal. | ||||||
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| And another very interesting article in Ars today, on a possible new approach to a Theory of Everything. For the most part it goes way too far over my head, but the high concept seems to be that, if you tweak one fundamental assumption of physics, you seem to wind up with a universe that looks very much like ours. The high concept seems to be that time and space have to be considered more separately than usual, and you can treat space as the same in all directions, but *not* time. I'm intrigued and curious, but have only the slightest idea of what they're talking about. (My math isn't nearly up to physics at this level, not to mention that reading the underlying papers appears to cost Real Money.) Hopefully, if this has any legs at all, someone will come up with a better layman's summary of the concrete implications of the idea... | ||||||
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Science geeks may want to check out this article in Ars Technica. Basically, a bunch of scientists attempted to do a principled simulation of the orbital mechanics of the inner solar system -- a very complex system, because of all the large elements in it and how they can interact. They ran the simulations out, making *tiny* modifications to the size of Mercury while doing so. The article sums it up:Out of the 2,500 runs that were performed, only about one percent resulted in a major disruptions in Mercury's orbit. This result is in agreement with prior works that had not taken general relativity or the lunar effects into account. However, when Mercury's orbit did become highly perturbed, large variations could occur, some of which saw disturbances in the dynamics of the entire inner Solar System—all of these using variances no larger than one meter.Those "variations" wound up producing scenarios ranging from Mercury falling into the Sun, to the Earth and Mars having a near-collision of less than 1000 km. Most of us think of the Solar System as very tidy and orderly, with things going around the Sun in near circles indefinitely. So it's fascinating to hear about simulations that show it to be a lot less simple than that. None of this is destiny, of course -- the system is quite difficult to simulate with real accuracy, and most results didn't get wonky -- but it does illustrate the range of possibilities... ETA: On rereading this, I realize that it makes it sound like the changes are sudden and dramatic. I should note that the simulations are for the next five billion years... | ||||||
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I am amused: the ad I just got in GMail read simply:test - test.com - test test | ||||||
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| Remember me mentioning, a couple of weeks ago, how Google would likely come out with a competitor to Wolfram Alpha? It's here, albeit only in very early-draft form. This week's interesting gadget is Google Squared. The idea is essentially that, instead of just presenting search results as links, you can have Google try to decompose the data that it finds into columns, for quick and easy comparison. Ars Technica has a dreadfully funny article about how bizarre the results can be -- unlike Wolfram Alpha, which very carefully tends each little bit of data to make sure that it works right, Google is attempting to guess what is relevant and interesting for this query, and sometimes fails spectacularly. Still, used properly, the thing looks like it has potential. For instance, the most obvious first query I thought of for it was "restaurants in Burlington, MA", and I got roughly the results I was expecting: one row per restaurant, with a picture (sometimes right, sometimes not) of it, its address, and its cuisine. It also included a "Specialty" column which seemed to be mostly junk, but the nice thing about Squared is that it lets you refine the query yourself -- so I could kill the irrelevant "Specialty" column, and add "Hours" easily. Knowing a particular restaurant I wanted to compare (I used Landana), I could just type that as a row, and Google looked up all the column values. And Squares can be saved and shared once you have the query refined to the point you like. It's not a world-shaker: it needs a *lot* of improvement before it's even going to be worth using for real. But I do think it shows a lot of potential as another blade in the Web's utility knife, especially as the Semantic Web grows, and gradually adds a bit more structure to the Web's uneven melange. Particularly for cases where you have a query that you expect "square" results for -- lots of rows, each of which has distinct and fairly consistent data fields -- it's likely to eventually become a tool of choice... | ||||||
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| Ah, yes -- that was what I needed for my blahs. Tonight was the event for Henry V, the latest Carolingian stage production, respectively autocratted by calygrey and directed by herooftheage. The event was mainly built around the play: it started at 5pm, with a simple but tasty feast prepared by rufinia (all good stuff, but the stars were the smeared rabbit and the dessert trifle), followed by the show.The production was entirely delightful. It was a complete rendition, with all sorts of material that I'd never seen before, since I've only seen highly-abridged versions. Unsurprisingly, the usually-trimmed humor particularly stuck in my mind; some highlights include:
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| The thing about grilled salmon is that it is the only food I know that I can (more or less consistently) make better than any restaurant I've yet found. Getting it just right -- done, but still so soft and moist that it's almost liquid in the center, with some crispy bits but not burned anywhere -- requires getting the timing just right and serving promptly. Doing so in a restaurant setting, with the necessary compromises that imposes, is quite hard. But once you've got it right, it's not all that hard on the home grill. (So long as you can get a consistently-shaped piece from the store.) And there are a hundred different sauces and rubs that you can apply to that basic formulation. Put it together, and you have perhaps the perfect grill food. Steak tips are great (especially with the well-known Cook's Illustrated marinades), but salmon is perfect... | ||||||
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Justin du Coeur
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