The senior management of my corporate division, including my boss, were on this bus.
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10:10:17 AM,
Friday 6 January 2006
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I hearby resolve to only blog about people saying things I find interesting or challenging, and avoid linking to things to people saying things daft or outrageous. They do it all the time. There's no shortage, and it isn't worth paying attention. Please grumble at me when I forget this.
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02:33:47 PM,
Thursday 5 January 2006
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Ugh. I have road-salt in my hair. I really do need to get mud-guards. This morning I was thinking: I leave the bicycle in a relatively safe place, and the number of people willing to steal a bicycle in the middle of winter must be fairly small anyway. The trouble with locking it up is the lock sometimes freezes up. The only reliable way of unfreezing it I've found using commonly found office equipment is to tip a cup of hot water over it. This, of course, gets it nice and wet, more or less assuring that it will continue to freeze up, so I end up putting it in a warm oven to dry out. This is all quite a lot of trouble, to protect a bicycle in a fenced off parking lot, invisible from the road, from being stolen by someone silly enough to steal a cheap, extremely recognizable recumbant bicycle in the middle of winter. It's added to the inconvenience of fiddling with the key and the lock.
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(2)
12:45:53 PM,
Thursday 5 January 2006
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Since Ana Marie Cox has left Wonkette, I've replaced it with the Panda Cam on my sidebar. I never particularly liked the concept, the character or the guest bloggers. I may have to browse her books in the bookstore, though.
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(2)
04:45:19 PM,
Wednesday 4 January 2006
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Ha! A new Ted Kennedy tidbit I'd previously overlooked: He was expelled from Harvard for paying a friend to sit his spanish exam for him. You'd think, democracy, right? We don't have to let ourselves be governed by the worthless relatives of our former leaders. Why do we still do it?
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea."
-Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
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(1)
03:14:23 PM,
Wednesday 4 January 2006
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So, Civilization IV. It is Good. I haven't seriously played Civilization since the original, though I did play Colonization and Alpha Centauri. This one is remarkably different. I won't bore you with the details, but combat has been entirely overhauled, and is far more interesting; city management is now both easier and more complex, and resources are now much more important. Old strategies no longer work. The key to all the Sid Meier type games is that they're an endless string of decisions without obvious answers, which let you tell your own stories. Civilization is particularly addictive because you've always got 5 or 6 plans in motion at once. Pirates and Railroad Tycoon are purer, but they aren't as engrossing. Civilization is also a remarkable diet aid: I forget to eat entirely. They've now added an alarm clock feature, which is probably healthy: you can sit down to play for a reasonable amount of time, say, 8 hours, rather than 16. I haven't tried the multi-player; I find playing video games with anonymous 13 year olds over the internet depressing, but if anyone wants to try a friendly game, I'd be happy to give it a go.
The one warning is that it's an absolutely awful memory hog, and badly wants you to have a 128 MB video card with texture support, which I don't have. I ended up turning off the videos (a setting buried in the .ini file) which makes the game somewhat anti-climactic, but stops it eating a gigabyte of virtual memory and then crashing.
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(3)
02:08:48 PM,
Wednesday 4 January 2006
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Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed? Perhaps Abramoff has some good qualities after all: Lack on integrity as a virtue. Thousands of emails! Delightful. Do you think this will lead to a rationalization of gambling laws in this country? Neither do I. I'm not sure what the solution is. Banning commercial gambling on consumer protection grounds sounds good to me, but wouldn't fly at this point. Politically enraged ESPN viewers would be a horrifying thing. Another thought would be to force states, if they wanted to legalize it, to legalize it properly; no more quasi-tribal monopolies. Of course, Connecticut didn't mean to legalized it, it was all a misunderstanding over bingo, and now they're stuck. I still want to go to Foxwoods, so as to know the enemy. Anyway, it seems ashame to miss something so very big and very tacky.
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(2)
12:51:38 PM,
Wednesday 4 January 2006
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A grating habit of political blogs is to assume that another's writing is self-evidently wrong, evil, or what have you. Self-evidently, It isn't self-evident to everyone: someone wrote it, after all. In particular, I'm thinking of this post by Kevin Drum. Does he believe that everyone is entitled to free life support? Are there some facts in the case that Landesburg is misrepresenting? We don't know. He doesn't say. If he has any policy thoughts, he doesn't let us know them. He simply sneers. This is unusual, he is usually one of the only ones who wades into policy questions when there isn't a partisan angle. The moral problems of end-of-life care were much simpler when medical care did, on average, more harm than good. Now they work up to a point, and are expensive. These aren't fake costs that can somehow be dismissed. Someone had to pay to keep her alive, and basic fairness says if one, then all. One blog post I read suggested that she should have been kept alive specifically because her prognosis was so bad; she wouldn't linger, you see, so it wouldn't have cost so very much. This sounds reasonable enough, but would be a horrible and disgusting policy: two patients, one who could live years, another who will only live a week; and the sicker one gets the respirator?
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01:10:10 PM,
Tuesday 3 January 2006
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Today I am Not Playing Civilization. It's a painful but necessary preperation to returning to work tomorrow.
Went to first night: Started with the kiddie fireworks at 7. They're actually launched from a corner of the common, and there are a lot of fountains and unpropelled ones moving in parabolas. Fireworks are more three dimensional close up. Watching the reflections in the office buildings was fascinating. Then saw an amazing but somehow unexciting classical guitarist, Joszef Halajko. Does anyone remember the name of the one who gave a 'lecture' at St. Johns? He ended with two wonderful pieces by one Paco Pe�a, who I will need to investigate. Next Prometheus Dance, was an awful, awful dance troupe that was above anything as crude as entertainment. Like vaguely vulgar marionettes. Disappointing. Snappy Dance, who we saw there last time, had left me with an inappropriately positive notion of modern dance. I thought it was supposed to be fun and amazing, rather than ostentatious and unsettling. Both the guitarist and the dancers spent most of the time on something that I can only think of as 'good for you' art, and then ended with something fun. Dancers keeping going for minutes after the music stops, for instance. A neat effect at the beginning, and undeniably difficult, but in the end, simply not as entertaining. What artists enjoy doing, and what audiences enjoy watching are two seperate things, and in high art the artist is given too much rein. We then went to a bluegrass show, Southern Rail; again, they liked playing faster than was good for the songs, and rather too many solos. One of the Gospel songs was wonderful, though. I like that bluegrass musicians are allowed to be old. Either the banjo player was much better than the mandolin player, or I simply like the sound of the banjo better.
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(1)
12:52:48 PM,
Monday 2 January 2006
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This silence is a byproduct of Civilization.
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06:12:05 PM,
Sunday 1 January 2005
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King Kong is the most exhausting film I've ever seen. I felt completely wrung out by the end. Never a dull moment.
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(4)
03:51:41 PM,
Tuesday 27 December 2005
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15 years after I came here for the first time, Central Pennsylvania still smells like cows when you drive in on route 78. I complained bitterly at the time. At this point I'm used to it.
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05:13:25 PM,
Friday 23 December 2005
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site & script courtesy of Moss
