Writing encouragement

I love this bio. At age 37 I still harbor fantasies about writing a Great American Novel, but with no writing background, literary degree or published credentials, getting published appears to be the sort of thing that will really require some kickstarting, even in the unlikely event that I make it to the end of the story. But this story is the kind that gives me fresh hope. Congratulations, Mr. Cunningham, and good luck with the writing thing.

Endorsements

Forthwith, my endorsements for Monroe County candidates.

Maybe not all of them. There's a voter's guide in the paper today. What gets my endorsement?

(1) A response. Candidates here and there didn't respond at all to the questionnaire from the League of Women Voters. What are they, too good for them? Kevin Enright gets my vote for surveyor. Richard Bray in the 37th and Vi Simpson in the 40th for State Senate.

(2) A non-incumbent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of incumbents didn't bother to respond. Put these first two items together and you'll know why I endorse David Sanders (D) over Steve Buyer for US Representative in District 4.

(3) Libertarians, and lost causes in general. Mike Englert is running for County Comissioner in district 2; I understand he used to go by the name "Moss" and protest logging by sitting in trees. You got to love that! Endorsed.

(4) You must know how to *write*. Al Cox is the Libertarian running against Baron Hill (D-9th), and so I would ordinarily vote for him. But he didn't even run a spellchecker over his answers to the surveys. Hill didn't bother to respond. Mike Sodrel? You get my vote by process of elimination.

(5) Reputation. Or in some cases, the lack of one. I've never met Jeff Ellington, but it seems like I've been hearing sleazy things about him my whole life. Iris Kiesling gets my vote for Monroe County district 3. I've always liked the work Paul Hager has done for small government, even if he did ditch the Libertarians. He gets my vote for State Rep in district 60.

(6) Skillz. The paper endorsed Sandy Newmann for Auditor, citing her experience with computers and accounting. Her opponent, the incumbent, is someone who seems like she's been in local government in one position or another forever. Time for a change.

There you have it. If the candidates want my vote in the next election, they should now know how to get it.

Winter exercise

It really gets tricky this time of year. Of course there is always the weight room, and my company provides a decent one that I'll probably end up using once a week or so, but I really need a little competition to get the heart pumping properly. I have a strong preference for field sports, primarily Ultimate Frisbee and soccer, but I like volleyball too. It looks like the pickup soccer group I play with will be able to play indoor again - man, I still really want some training - but I don't know about indoor ultimate. I've just this summer started monitoring the Indiana University and Indianapolis frisbee mailing lists again, and I went out and scrimmaged one night with the IU co-ed team. It was fun, but I only had about half an hour in me to keep up with the kids. I'll probably take a shot at the Riverside Indy game sometime too, if they have any more this year. For volleyball, I tried to put together a Bloomington city league team a few years ago, but it never really got off the ground, and I don't have the skills to try to muscle onto a team. I'll check their schedule anyway.

Bloghunting

It's an odd thing that it seems to be really hard to find topical blogs to read. There was an article in Forbes, I think, a while ago that listed the Ten Best Sports Blogs and the Ten Best Economic Blogs and things like that, but every so often I get a wild hair and decide, "I'm going to go subscribe to some Science Fiction blogs." So off I go to Google and search for them, and a few minutes turn up blogs by ten or so SciFi writers, but that wasn't quite where I was going. I wanted a blog about Science Fiction. I wanted book reviews, discussions of classic series, thoughts on the physics of Star Trek. Maybe it's different for books. I love to read Arnold Kling, the econ prof, but when you get right down to it, I don't suppose he really produces much other than words, so his blog ought to be good. Anyone who wants to talk about Star Trek probably doesn't output all that much. Same with soccer, Ultimate Frisbee, and a few other things that don't draw many professional writers.

I suppose what it comes down to is that the best blogs are just written by good writers, rather than topical ones. Wouldn't it be cool if you could aggregate blogs by topic rather than by author? Maybe that's the next big thing; of course we don't get topic listings here at blogger. Something to look forward to.

Added Haloscan trackback

I've noticed that my page doesn't look as cool as most of the pages out there. I suppose that's a bad thing, but somehow I don't care; the most distinguishing feature of a cool looking page seem to be really small text in light letters on a dark background. I can't bear reading most of them without my Bandit.

Still, when I get a chance I fiddle around with the settings and add stuff here and there. Today I turned off Blogger comments and put in Haloscan instead. Trackbacks are way cool and I can't understand why Blogger doesn't have them natively.

Windows automatic reboots

Scoble talks about Windows machines rebooting automatically. My company has a story to tell about this too. A server that runs the almost-nearly-practically production versions of our software, driving our phone systems, suddenly rebooted itself. It took us a long time to figure out what exactly had happened; we thought our software had caused a serious machine blowup, and a good chunk of the company was without phone service for several minutes. Our IT guys were aware of the automatic reboot possibility but didn't think that option was set on the machine. How it got set remains a mystery.

Bush / Kerry again

The three-year-old is usually working on bed between 8 and 9, so I keep missing the first parts of these debates. Here's some thoughts on the ending, though:

9:27. Kerry just said he doesn't care if an idea is a liberal idea or a conservative idea, as long as it's a good idea. That was one of Clinton's strengths, to pick up good conservative ideas like balancing the budget. It's a shame neither of these candidates have any good ideas, though.

9:22. Bush is claiming that America was divided in the 2000 election and in the 90's, too. Not true, certainly not like it is today.

9:18. One thing I've always liked about Bush is that he's always talked a very tolerant position for other religions. He's talking about everyone's right to worship or not to worship as they choose. This is in contrast to his father, actually, who said he didn't think atheists should be granted full rights.

9:13. It's amazing how far apart these two are. It seems like every response by Bush starts out with, "That's just not true!" Kerry mentioned Bush has never met with the NAACP, but the president ignored that. Might as well, it's not like he's going to get any black votes anyway.

9:09. Is it just me, or is the President looking really flustered? ...nice response by Kerry on assault weapons; managed to sneak terrorism into it too.

9:04. Good grief, the moderator brought up the draft. I really hate when they ask questions where the answer is, "Yes, I oppose that. Now about Iraq...".

8:58. Minimum wage. The whole debate is silly, really, as minimum wage issues are like public schools, the only thing they're good for is political posturing. If anyone was serious about fixing the minimum wage, they would peg it to the inflation rate like social security is.

Play Review: Pride and Prejudice

We went up and saw this at the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis. I wrote a review of Emma a while ago, but I prefer P&P, and in the last six months I've read the book, watched the A&E miniseries, watched a movie, and now gone to see the play. So I think I've got a handle on the plot now.

Of the three "acted" performances I've seen, the A&E miniseries was my favorite, I think because it was the one that had the length to stay truest to the book. Most good stories can't be told in video in less than five or six hours, so the movie I found pretty disappointing. The play was in a category by itself, though. There was a fair amount of slapstick in it; not many serious scenes at all. The acting was certainly fine, I had no issues with the skills of the actors at all. Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Collins were especially good, probably because they camped up the characters pretty heavily. The girl who played Lydia Bennett gave her a very thick nasal accent, which I didn't really see any reason for. What bothered me the most, though, was Mr. Darcy during the first hour of the play, when it was very clear that what he was doing was courting Lizzy. This is certainly not true to the book. In the book, Darcy's pride would never allow him to court anyone as low-born as Lizzy, and even when he paid her compliments, they wree usually done as an attempt to fend off Caroline Bingley's advances. So to have him up there actually making googoo eyes at Lizzy, I found a bit odd.

One reason why I shouldn't be writing play reviews is that I don't see enough of them. This is a case where I want to say, "Oh, but in the London production Darcy was acted most excellently." I can't say that, though, because I haven't seen any other production, and for all I know the courting is part of the play, not something the actor does. Maybe they need to play up Darcy's attraction to keep the plot moving? I wasn't sure, but if I had been directing I would have told Darcy to act the part more as the proud, arrogant nobleman he was.

The other fault I found was with the Bennett sisters' costumes. They looked like they were all wearing nightgowns for the whole play. I suspect this was due to a lack of available period underwear; if you want to make a gown like that look right, you need to be buttoned, strapped, belted, and tied in properly.

But I enjoyed the play, overall. Definitely worth seeing, and, although I suspect the Indianapolis audience isn't overly critical, they gave a standing ovation.

Bush / Kerry debate

9:29. Asking Bush what poor decisions he's made. That's a softball for any experienced politician. They used it to make their usual points about flip-flopping and war mistakes.

9:24. Wow, a very blunt abortion question. If someone asked that at a confirmation hearing they'd be booed right off the committee. Bush's straight-up pro-life position is an advantage here - Kerry has a more subtle point to make.

9:21. Bush put out some nice generalities on the Supreme Court issue. Kerry is hammering back with specifics, pointing out that Bush said Scalia is one of his favorite judges. Scalia is the worst judge on the current Supreme Court.

9:16. President Bush is talking about his stem cell decision, which is a pretty political balance - not going out too far on the pro-life agenda to alienate the moderates.

9:10. Senator Kerry is wearing a red tie. The President is wearing a blue tie. OK, maybe it matches the background better, but c'mon! Got to have the power tie!

Book review: Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

There's a little blurb on the cover of my copy from Hemingway, saying that all American literature springs from Huckleberry Finn. Maybe it's true, maybe not, but it's clear there is a style about Huck Finn. The language is exceedingly simple, the plot consists of a series of more or less unrelated scenes. But the dialect rings very authentic; Jim's voice as a slave, and Huck's voice as an uneducated Missourian. I think the most intriguing thing of all about the book is Huck's certainty that stealing slaves is an unethical thing to do. He goes back and forth, anguishing over whether to turn Jim in or help him escape to a free state, eventually deciding that, since he was born a bad person, he's just going to help Jim escape and chance the eternal flames. Now, if this book had been written in 1983, this would have been the absolutely predictable decision that the character would have made. We all know slavery is, and was, evil, and for a book in 1983 to come to any other conclusion would have been either (a) unthinkable, or (b) Literature. But I wonder how inevitable the conclusion was to readers in the early 19th century.

Huck Finn makes a lot of banned books, of course, and let me see if I can get my blog on any available banned blog lists by revealing why: the constant repetition of the word nigger. I suppose it's less likely now, though, due to its relatatively common usage black-on-black. So I'd guess anyone Googling for that word will find my blog pretty low down on the list. In the book, the usage is absolutely authentic; Huck uses it, Jim uses it, every character in the book uses it. At any rate, I distinctly remember reading a letter of Abraham Lincoln referring to "Darkies", and I haven't heard anyone suggesting that his books be banned.

The flak over banning of books is really a tempest in a teacup, though, IMO. The only true definition of censorship is when the government disallows the book entirely. To claim that a book has been censored just because a single school library has decided not to carry it is disingenuous, especially in these days when pornography is available for free and books can just be downloaded. I don't buy into the NRA-style slippery-slope arguments. Things that are right, are right, and a library's freedom to make its own decisions about what books to carry is right.

I suppose the key question about Huck Finn, though, is how relevant is it, really, today? I can't answer that. For literary critics it's probably important as the Book That Spawned American Literature, but I find that analagous to playing Pong, The Game That Spawned American Video. It was a great game then, but today's games are a lot better.

Broadcast censorship

Howard Stern is moving to satellite radio. More power to him - I'm a Sirius subscriber myself, not that I would ever listen to the man. But the articles I'm hearing seem to be focused mostly on why satellite radio isn't censored, while the airwaves are. But there's a very good reason for that. Broadcast signals are a limited resource, and the government in its wisdom, has decreed that they are a public resource. Stations that broadcast are given a license by the government to use a certain frequency, and in return they promise to do certain things, like not swear, and run public service announcements. But satellite and cable transmissions are not a limited resource. In theory you could have as many as you wanted, and the government has absolutely no legitimate interest in any kind of regulation. So the FCC should not be regulating cable or satellite broadcasts.

Birthday the Third

The youngster is three this week; I'll put up pictures on the web site...well, when I get around to it. The interesting thing about his cake this year was its size - it was big. We ordered it for 20 but I don't think they took into account that half the twenty were three-year-olds. So if anyone wants some birthday cake just drop me a line. The theme this year was trains. We asked for a Thomas the Tank Engine cake, but they said they couldn't do trademarked material, so we asked for a cake with a railroad on it, and we put a little store-bought Thomas in. Sigh. The railroad had a mountain and a tunnel to go through, though; very nice.

Recent ways I've found of wasting money on cool toys:

• Sirius Satellite Radio
• Product 9 Video Editor
• Wireless Print Server

Church web site

Off and on I've been updating our web site, and I added a volunteering form this week. I don't think anyone had really been paying attention to it, though, because I sent the link off to Pastor Annette, and she forwarded it to the church mailing list, and then I got a few volunteers and a few compliments on the site design. So that was nice. Next task: Bios of the principals of the church, and more detailed descriptions of church events.

Internet sports video

I was clicking around Google and ESPN today, since the IU football game starts in an hour or so. Of course it's not on TV - why would it be? - so I was curious to see what my options for bringing in Internet video were. I checked ESPN.com, fiddled around for a while without success, and then found some kind of pop-behind window I hadn't noticed come up with an option to subscribe to all college football games, $120 for the season.

I don't want all college football games. I want today's IU game, that's all. Who knows when I might have time to log in again during a football game? So that's out of the question. What else is there?

Starting with the IU website, looks like they might do something with Yahoo. Yes, they can do football broadcasts, but for IU, only radio...and what's this? What do you know, you have to subscribe for the whole season. Huh.

Wonder how much they're getting out of IU fans wanting to listen to IU football over the Internet? $20 a month or so?

Why on earth aren't these games PPV? Is anyone actually subscribing any other way?

Small theater groups near Bloomington

Looking for some great, yet inexpensive, live entertainment? Try one of these groups:

Little Theater of Bedford

Bloomington Playwrights Project

Brown County Playhouse

Shawnee Theatre

Indiana University Theater

Play review: Caught in the Net, Ray Cooney

We went over to the Brown County Playhouse to see this. As of tonight, I am officially a Big Fan of Ray Cooney; I thought before we went to see the play that I'd recognized the name, and reading the program I recognized a couple of other titles of his that I'd seen. I'm not a play-going afficionado by any means, especially since the three-year-old was born, but I try to get to a few plays every year. Cooney specializes in the British farce; that is a play where the main character tells a lie to cover some indiscretion or problem of his, then has to go on inventing bigger and bigger lies to try to keep holding everything together. In this one, the main character is a man with two wives in different parts of London, and a teenaged child by each one, who eventually meet over the Internet.

As it starts out, you assume the man (played by Jonathan Molitor) is going to be the main prevaricator, since he has been holding the two households together for many years, but it soon turns out that his reluctant buddy Stanley Gardner (Scot Purkeypile) has the real creative genius, coming up with a series of lies to tell every character, and almost holding the whole thing together until the very end. I was impressed by Mr. Purkeypile, who had a real sense of physical humor. He had just finished playing Froggy in The Foreigner, and I kept looking at him and thinking how perfect he must have been in that part.

The play started out a little rough. Watching comedies, I pay a lot of attention to timing, and I thought the timing of a few of the lines was a little rough. But things quickly smoothed out, and midway through the first half I was lost in the action and trying to keep track of which character knew what. That's always how I know a play's gotten good, if I'm no longer paying to the dynamics of it. Before the end there were plenty of moments that had the audience rolling in the aisles.

Playhouse tickets were $17, even before you get into the ridiculous Ticketmaster fees. (I once tried to order tickets to a museum through there, and children under 10 were free. Ticketmaster wanted to charge me a $3 handling fee for my free ticket. Wrong.) You can get them without additional fees at the IU box office, but it still strikes me as a little high. Maybe I'm getting old, though; I think most things are ridiculously overpriced. Oh well, I'll certainly be back next year if another Cooney play is on.

Book review: Emma, Jane Austen

It's an interesting thing to note, that if you go searching for information on Emma on the web, 90% of the hits you get will be aimed at kids. I'd assume high schoolers, since I wouldn't assign the book to younger readers myself, but still, questions like "How many characters marry in Emma?" make me cringe. I think the correct answer is, "All of them", more or less. Then there are the Austen online biographies, of which there are roughly three million. I don't know how much I'd have to wade through to get the answers I want, to the questions I have, none of which I can remember any more. The edition of the book I read wasn't annotated much better, either. We learn that "Imaginist" is a word Ms. Austen made up which means, "One who imagines", and that's great, but somehow I think I could have figured it out all on my own. On the other hand, every so often there is an allusion or maybe just something going on behind the scenes, that I'm sure was perfectly clear to every contemporary reader of the book, which left me saying, "Now what exactly did you mean by that?"

My favorite thing about reading these older books is the unconscious descriptions of the society. You can hear people saying, "Oh yes, back then women were practically forced to get married, they were always addressed as Mrs. or Miss, and they always took their husbands' names" but you don't really feel it until you read a book like Emma, where things like this aren't discussed, aren't mentioned, they simply permeate the book and the telling of the story. They are basic facts of existence Without Which One Could Not Exist. You don't get the same effect from reading a modern novel that is merely based in that time.

Anyway, it's a good book. You have to enjoy the "Novel of Manners", as I've heard them called; there is a surprising lack of car chases, death scenes, or even bank robberies; the point of the book is simply: how does one get what one wants in a society in which behavior is so strictly regulated? You soothe, you hint. You avoid ruffling feathers. At one point Emma is obliged to spend an afternoon with Mrs. Elton, whom she truly dislikes, in order that her degree of dislike not be known. (The utter uncouthness of Mrs. Elton simply cannot be described; she refers to her husband as "Mr. E", if you can imagine.) But once you get into the feel of thing, the lack of manners is truly grating. I think I'd prefer to bang my head against the wall rather than read over one of Mrs. Elton's obnoxious speeches again.

I'm not going over the plot. Google for "Jane Austen Emma" for many many descriptions - primarily in words of one syllable - and you'll find everything you need to know. It starts a bit slow, but by the time Emma has managed to get herself well and truly tangled in her attempts to matchmake for everyone around her, it's impossible to put down without finding out how she extricates herself. Read it. And always be polite.

Technorati

I don't get what Technorati is about. I blogged last night about losing weight, right? They claim they index blogs, right? Yet, if I go there and search for "Losing Weight", I get three pages of entries that don't include mine. If I search for my name, I get "No results found". So am I not indexed? If blogs aren't being indexed, what's the point of Technorati? It's not like spiders can't find this page. Now, if I don't show up because I don't have anyone linking to me, that's cool; but I wish I could find that information out somewhere on the site. I even went there and "Claimed my blog" one day, I think. Username and password are long lost. So what are they doing over there? Anyone know?

Losing weight

So I gained a few pounds on vacation. I had a goal of losing 20 pounds this year, and I was doing pretty well until vacation, when we went out for meals, drank quite a bit, and ate snacks in the hotel in the evening. Still, I managed to hit the treadmill three times during the week, so I thought I'd be doing ok, if not great. So I was really irritated when I got home and found I'd gained six or seven pounds for the week.

Of course, that was a bit high; probably quite a bit of water. I managed to work most of it off with soccer and Ultimate Frisbee the first couple of days back, but I was still 7 pounds shy of my goal for the end of August, so I've really been trying to cut back on calories since then. I'm still probably two or three pounds too heavy with a week to go yet, with one soccer game yet to play. Ah well, maybe I can find a few minutes to run as well.

Back from vacation

Wow! A whole week in exotic Evansville, IN. We really live it up on our vacations.

In all seriousness, we did spend most of the time in Evansville, and had a great time. I wish the hotel had had Wi-Fi, and I would have blogged each day, instead of the couple of sentences I'm going to provide now. We spent the first couple of days in New Harmony, IN, the site of some Utopian experiments in the early 1800's. Most people could probably do the town in a few hours, but we were interested enough to come back the second day to look at the things we missed. I especially liked a recorded lecture over a miniature layout of the city. We also visited the State Park and the Wabash River, which was bigger than I remembered.

We visited the George Reitz house, a very nice old house, where we were guided by a very knowledgable tour guide, who kept throwing things out like, "We're having the restorers come in next week to see if there's any old wallpaper behind this whitewash", which is a nice change from the rather bland from-memory speeches you often get in this sort of house.

We went to French Lick and West Baden, to see the old hotel that has been recently remodeled. We didn't get to see much, they had big No Trespassing signs everywhere. But there was also a train museum in town, which was very nice, although we didn't actually take a ride.

We visited another train museum in Evansville, as well as the Museum of Arts and Sciences and the Children's Museum. The train museum was a great value for $2. The Children's museum was a bit on the small side, although we would definitely be members if we lived closer.

We visited Angel Mounds State Park, to look at the old Indian mounds. I preferred the inside displays to the outside ones, which mostly consisted of "Don't walk here" signs. We did see a Snowy Egret in the wetland.

We drove over to Kentucky to visit the Audubon state park. Very nice birdfeeding stations, with dozens of hummers and a few other things. The audio tour of James Audubon's life was nearly an hour long, and discussed a surprising number of exhibits in a very small space.

We went to Connersville and, in our third train museum, finally took a train ride, from Connersville to Metamora and back. The museum had no less than five Thomas the Tank Engine train tables, and an extensive Thomas gift shop.

We watched lots of Court TV and gained lots of weight, at least I did :) All in all, we vacationed good and hard, and now I'm happy to get back to my desk and relax!

Book review: Chicago River, Libby Hill

I have a habit, when we take a vacation, of picking up a book with some local history or some interesting information about a site, since I read voraciously I prefer a book as a souvenir to some knicknack that I'll never find a place to keep. (The downside, of course, is that I constantly need more bookshelves.) So on our Chicago trip I picked up this history of the Chicago river, which is chock-full of information and fascinating research on the river. I'm looking forward to our next trip, now, to examine the mouth of the river with my new understanding that it is now engineered to flow outwards from Lake Michigan and, eventually, empty into the Gulf of Mexico. I had no idea.

The author has done a lot of what I like to do, which is to wander out to some random place and say, "Wow, I wonder what this looked like 20 years ago? Or 50, or a hundred?". If the place is on the Chicago River, you will find out in this book. Tons of details, with discussion like, "The tiny creek actually flowed into the river just south of the Mini-Mart on Calcutta Avenue." If I were a native this kind of detail would be terrific, and I would be sure to swing by Calcutta Avenue some time and see if I could actually find the ditch. Since I'm not, I have to wish someone would write a similar book about Spanker's Branch, the tiny creek that runs through the Indiana University campus here in Bloomington. I think I'll be waiting a long time.

The book tails off a bit in the end, with some pieces that almost seem like propaganda concerning various nature preserves that now exist on or near the river banks, and there is a map in the back showing "Golf Courses on the Chicago River", as if I might be interested in spending a summer golfing down the banks. Judging from the number of courses, I probably could.

But the first 80% of the book is terrific reading for local history buffs. There was a series of books many years ago on rivers - maybe a depression-era public works project? Employ those writers! - and that had a Chicago River book as well, which is referenced by this updated version, but this one is obviously a labor of love. The older books spend a lot of time discussing the people who happened to live on the river banks rather than the river itself. I bought one on the Ohio River as a souvenir of a trip to Cincinnati, and I haven't managed to slog through the whole thing yet. But if an update comes out that is as good as the Chicago River book, I'll be in line to buy it.

Book trading site

Thought I had a great idea for a new web site for a minute; a book-trading site, where you would agree to send used books to other members if they would send books to you.  I know, I know, trading sites don't make profits and went out in the 90's, but I don't think that's the goal; any more than the little old men in carpet slippers who run used brick-and-mortar bookstores are really in it to make a profit.   The goal is to get around the godawful prices of books these days, and to find them nice homes when you're done with them.
 
But I did a quick search before I really started to look into it, and I found this one.  I skimmed for reviews and users, and found...nothing.  I don't think they've been open for more than three months, so I'm thinking I just missed the boat here.  Well, book trading is my goal, so I'll give them a try.  Hope they don't do anything evil with my credit card number.
 

Chicago

Went to Chicago for the weekend.  It's turned into an annual event for us, just to go up and visit some cool stuff; the art museum, the field museum; the Navy Pier.  Well, that last one wasn't so hot - somehow I just can't get too excited about a place that charges a buck for a refill of iced tea.   I hate to think what their profit margin on that must be.  We visited the children's museum too, which was...not terrible.  They had some nice stuff for the two-year-old, but it was pretty jammed together.  They could have used quite a bit more space.  The children's museums in Indianapolis and Bloomington - and Cincinnati, for that matter - are nicer.
 
But of course, the highlight of Chicago for me is the museum campus.  We only went to the Field Museum this year, but the aquarium and the other museums can't be beat.  We actually walked from the Navy Pier to the campus this year - a couple of miles, and pushing a stroller!
 
Topped it off with a quick visit to Indiana Dunes.  We went, unprepared, to the beach.   Swimming in Lake Michigan beats swimming in Monroe Lake, surprisingly enough.  The visit was way too short.
 

Book review: Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke

Okay, so I'm a little late with this one. But at least I read it, and all the way through; bought it on eBay for $15 and you couldn't have done that six months ago.

It's a good book. It opens with a description of what Clarke was doing on September 11, and it is riveting. It's exciting to hear what was going on at the White House: "They did what? What else can they do? Shut down this! Close that! Scramble the fighters!" Very cool stuff.

Clarke is clearly a Clinton fan. I was at Goodwill a few weeks ago and picked up George Stephanopoulos' autobiography, so I've read two sympathetic books in the last few weeks, and my opinion of Clinton has gone up a lot. I always thought he was a good president due to his domestic agenda, the balancing of the budget, and the roaring economy, but I was at least willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt and say that he's done an okay job against terrorism. When the Iraq war started, I was on-the-fence to negative, thinking that the war would probably do no more harm than good. The utter incompetence at the peace process, however, has pretty much turned me into an Anyone-But-Bush'er.

According to Clarke, however, Bush has totally screwed up the war against terrorism as well. Starting with the lack of planning that allowed 9/11 to happen, followed by an indecisive response in Afghanistan, and of course the leap to conclusions that started the Iraq war, Clarke shreds the Bush administration top to bottom. I can't say for sure that it deserves to be shredded, from my own knowledge; more reading is needed here.

That's the big talking point of the book, of course. We've all seen the headlines: "Former Bush aide writes tell-all!" The fact is, though, the Bush administration is covered pretty quickly in the last couple of chapters. The meat of the book is about the Clinton administration, and the claim that Clarke makes that I'm surprised didn't get a lot of airplay, was the claim that Clinton did a darn good job against terrorism. Clarke blames bureaucracy and the intelligence services for the failures on the Clinton watch.

So is it true? I can't say it is for sure. But what I do know is that 9/11 happened under the Bush administration, which is demonstrably incompetent at so many things, and it sure wouldn't surprise me to find that "Preventing Major Terrorist Attacks" is another area where Bush gets a failing grade.

Counterterrorism Wiki

So I started reading Against All Enemies this week. I'll do a book review of that when I get done, too, but the thing that really strikes me is how hard it is to follow all the information in it. I'm not reading it with an agenda - well, yes I am, Bush stinks - so trying to really understand in my head what was going on is pretty tough. And Clarke does a lot of things like blaming the CIA and FBI for problems, where I'm sure that if I read a book about the CIA I'd hear a pretty different version of events. So I went over to SeedWiki and started up a CounterTerrorism wiki. What I've written on it so far is just a few things and links I've found, but I really only have one goal for it - understanding what the heck Clarke is talking about. Due to the nature of Wiki's, of course, it may end up being something else entirely.

Diversity

My child is nearly three. It won't be long before we have to think about a school for him. One of my top choices is Harmony School, but I wonder if I can be accused of elitism if I want to send him to a private school? I think my dad would say he needs to be exposed to children of diferent backgrounds than us, and I am sympathetic to that. But some kinds of diversity I don't want. For example, I would be perfectly happy not having him exposed to:

- Students who don't feel that education is important.

- Students who believe that the world owes them a living.

- Students who are just marking time until they are legally allowed to leave school.

- Lawyers.

Well, OK, I suppose that last one isn't a big issue in preschool.

So am I an elitist?

Book review: The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett

For the sake of full disclosure, I'm a big Pratchett fan. I breathlessly wait for every new novel and run out and buy it as soon as it comes out. (In paperback, that is. I'm not made of money here.) So it's convenient that in his recent forays into the children's market (like Amazing Maurice), if there was ever a hardback version I didn't see it, and got to buy the paperback version as soon as I knew about it.

But even so, I was hesitant to read Maurice. A good author for grownups does not necessarily make a good author for kids, and I was very ready to be disappointed with what made the Discworld interesting for kids. But I wasn't. When you read Pratchett, you can always expect to see the conventional wisdom turned on its head. The witches are heroes, the handsome prince is a bad guy. If you stay true to yourself and follow your dreams, you'll get your rear kicked by the guy down the street who works for a living. And I was very glad to see this pattern continuing in Wee Free Men.

As a matter of fact, it's hard to say what really makes this a kid's book. "Teen fiction" is where you'll find it categorized, but the only difference, really, between this and any other Discworld book is maybe just a slight lack of depth in the characters. Even then, it's just as likely that they will show up in other books to become more rounded out. The Nac Mac Feegle have already appeared in Nanny Ogg's kitchen, for example, and I read one review claiming that the aerial Night Watch officer in that book was one as well, although I missed that when I read it. I'll check more carefully on my next read.

And it has to be said, Tiffany Aching, the nine-year-old pre-witch, is a compelling character. It'll be clear to readers familiar with the series that she has all the right attributes to be a talented witch, unlike, for example, Magrat Garlick, or Tiffany's would-be mentor, Miss Tick. Tiffany not only has the smarts, but also the sense to know when it's better to whomp a monster on the head with a frying pan rather than close her eyes and magic it away. I wonder if we'll get to watch her growing through her teen years to adulthood, like Death's granddaughter Susan. We can hope.

All in all, I just have to think of this book as A Discworld Book, and that is how I will categorize future Pratchett "teen fiction" offerings; to be bought as soon as they are available.

And speaking of that, Mr. Pratchett: I'm done with this one. May I have another?

Onine church calendar

I was asked to look at online calendars for church this month. I spent a few hours on it and came up with three: Calendars Net, Super Calendar, and Hunt Calendars. The most important thing I think I found is that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of distinguishing features. To write up a report for the church, I checked prices, and tried to compare ease-of-use and reliability. But I don't think I did it right, because my recommendation actually was questioned because I'd rated the only calendar that wasn't free highest :) Super Calendar costs $20 a year. But I recommended Calendars Net, mostly because it was free and allowed sending reminders for free, the only one of the three that did that. But maybe I missed something...if you know of a better online calendar or a better idea for calendars in general, post it in the comments.

How To Blog by Tony Pierce

Keepin' it real here. My only issue is, I searched all over the site and never found the bloody RSS or Atom feeds. What am I supposed to do, read it in my browser or something? (Thanks Hugh)

Mt. Rainier is in sight

That's right, I'm in Seattle today. Flew in for a two-day conference at Microsoft. It's really cool that both Microsoft and my hotel have wireless access; I like being able to turn on my laptop just about anywhere and have access. Cathy would have liked to make it a family trip, but that would have meant Jesse not going to Vacation Bible School, and I really can't conceive of six hours in an airplane with a two-year-old. Maybe next year. I can't decide if I made the right decision not to rent a car. Cab ride to the hotel was $35, and $35 back again of course, but I think finding a very easy bus route to Microsoft was the clincher. A buck fifty for a four-mile ride, and I imagine renting a car would have been more than $100, plus all the parking headaches.

I subscribe to Dana Epp's blog. Can't believe they're scheduling a dinner just a few days after I leave!

Evangelism and IT lessons from a church

Scoble is one of the most-read bloggers around, so I don't know why I'm linking to him. Good article though, and good reading if you are - like me - on a church's Outreach committee.

Rough day today

Rough day today. After an extra-long church service with Communion and new church members, went downstairs for a potluck dinner and baby shower, and the little one got his fingers caught in the door. Off we went to the health clinic, where we proceeded to wait. And wait. Eventually I went off to McDonalds to feed the troops, ignoring the comment in the room saying "No food allowed!" Finally we did get the fingers X-rayed, and it looks like there are no breaks, so Jesse gets lots of Advil and some very sore fingers for the next few days.

My pastor has started a blog! I've been encouraging lots of people to blog; the CEO of my company, my dad, the pastor. It's bad form, they say, to make your first entry about blogging itself, and Annette avoided that error - unlike me - but the art form is new enough to be interesting, and widespread enough to be a real social phenomenon. What does it mean when this many people can post their thoughts, publicly, and be widely read by even more? It is, in a lot of ways, the way that Americans can stop Bowling Alone, and reconnect with their communities, and it seems to me that religious leaders should be in the forefront of that movement.

I sent a message to the webmaster of the local paper this week, saying, "Are you offering RSS feeds? If not, when will you start?"

Got a message back a couple of hours later saying, "Sounds like a good idea - try this feed out and see if it works."

It didn't at the time, but a couple of iterations later the local paper is now offering RSS feeds! How cool is that?

Herald-Times RSS feed

The major topic of discussion on the news this morning was the gay marriages taking place in Massachusetts.

There's a lot going on in the world today. A disastrous war in Iraq, leading to massive federal budget deficits. Gas prices spiking to record levels. Torture and abuse of prisoners, in Iraq for sure and probably at Guantanamo. Afghanistan is still a mess; so is most of Africa, and the Palestinians and Israelis are no nearer peace than ever.

In all this, is it really important who got married today?

There was an article in the local paper today - I'll add a link, but I bet it's not permanent - about electronic voting. The author, who claims to have a PhD in computer science, is pretty hard against any kind of computer based voting. I don't understand why. The arguments are all correct, of course - poor programming or malicious programmers could cause votes not to be counted or even recorded differently from what the voter intended - but in conjunction with a printed ballot, I see very little possibility of serious problems. The nice thing about a computer-printed ballot is this: it doesn't need to be human-readable. Wouldn't it be cool if each ballot printed out to an inch-high bar code on a standard piece of paper? You could fit 10 votes or so on a page, and create software to scan the ballot back if required. This way, each voter could have his ballot scanned for accuracy even before leaving the polling place, and recounts would be an easy job. Why is this so difficult?

Meme via Burning Bird: From "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty". "According to his son Bucky, he never spoke about them later in life." Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. I would add to the instructions: point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads. I got the idea from Ongoing. When I opened the book I thought I'd be out of luck, but luckily there were exactly five full sentences on the page :)

Went to Columbus, OH this week on a spur-of-the-moment thing - the Indiana University soccer team was playing an exhibition game before the Columbus Crew Major League Soccer opener, so we thought we'd drive over and see what it was like. We picked up my dad and stepmom on the way too. It started out pretty nice, fairly warm temperatures and bright sunshine, and we got to see IU beat Maryland in a goal in the last couple of minutes. But things went downhill fast - there was a two hour wait before the Crew game, the wind picked up, temperature dropped, it started to rain...a pretty miserable experience. My stepmom leaned over to me and said, "At least it's not hailing!" A good sport - she only came along since we all did. We bailed out at halftime - dropped off the 'rents at their house and got back to Bloomington at about two in the morning. It's kind of a bummer for Jesse - the two-year-old - since it really disrupts his schedule, but man, I love to do that sort of thing.

I joined Gasbuddy tonight. Driving between Indianapolis and Bloomington as much as I do, I think I can use it just as a personal record of gas prices even if no one else ever enters a thing.

Haven't slept well all this week. Is it just me, or does everybody go on these binges when new stuff is going on, where you just lie in bed and look at the ceiling and think about them? I'm looking forward to having some exciting new tasks at work, but I suspect I will have to work to get them assigned to me officially. So I think about what how I should do them, and will people approve of them, and am I doing them the best way possible, and things like that.

I'm playing indoor soccer twice a week as well. I'm a lousy soccer player - never really played as a kid. At least the indoor season is coming to an end soon, and my shins will be thankful for that. But as I play more, and figure out how to do more things, I lie in bed and think about what I SHOULD be doing, and what I SHOULD have done last time I played. So I'm in bed usually around 11, and up around 3 or 4, with nothing to distract my attention until 5 when the news comes on the radio.

The soccer relevation that I had this week came from an experienced player who tried to show me how you make a cut as a forward, involving cutting to the inside of the defending player towards the middle area of the field. That's fine and I certainly see why you'd WANT to do that; the problem from my perspective is that if I get the ball in the right area, I certainly won't be able to do anything with it :) So I'm thinking what I need to do is get some practice in, stopping the ball, turning around with it, and taking a shot, all without losing it to the defender next to me. Unfortunately, in the pickup games I play in, we don't ever do anything like drills, it's all scrimmaging. I spent some time doing an Internet search to see if there were any classes available locally for adult beginners, but it appears we're a really left-out group. I'm thinking about asking an ace 16-year-old at church to do some workouts with me.

Got my wife her first digital camera today, a Kodak DX4530. She's never that excited about going digital for anything, but I happened to mention a few weeks ago that Kodak was quitting making film cameras, and that freaked her out enough that she decided it was time to join the revolution :) She did all the research on it herself, and it seems like a really nice camera for non-professionals like us. I like that it was less than $400, and that it does 5MP. Once she goes digital for something, she's usually pretty happy with it - does most of her communication by email, and does some instant messaging too. The other day the cable modem went down, and she called the support people herself, waited 40 minutes on hold, and with their help managed to fix the problem - a loose cable going to the router - by herself. I was pretty impressed. Ask her to her face, though, and she'll tell you she's a confirmed Luddite.

Finally got back to working on the church web page. I'm far from an expert in FrontPage yet, so I set it up as its own site on my computer, which I intended to publish to a subdirectory of my site on my provider. FrontPage didn't like that at all! I tried to hack around it by putting the whole site into a single directory that represented the subdir, but apparently it was still not happy with things like the themes directory. It still doesn't look the same on my computer as it does on the web, but it's getting closer. On the agenda: A privacy policy, and ways to register multiple kids at once for Vacation Bible School.

I also agreed to take over data entry for the church address book. This might have been a mistake. They are using an old program named Day-Timer that is no longer supported, and I couldn't even get it to install on my laptop! So we'll be looking to upgrade sometime soon, I hope. It's interesting that what the church really needs is an IT guy. Don't think I can volunteer since I'm already stretched pretty thin, but it's looking like a pretty important step to me.

My wife is a deacon at our church. I wonder if that makes me a deaconess? The pastor's husband told her the other day that she was the best deacon they'd ever had. I believe it. She's very responsible, as well as being very giving. I can't imagine another two traits that would combine for good deacon-hood.

What do deacons do? I suppose the role is different from church to church. Our church divides the congregants into "families", so each deacon is responsible for a subset of the church. Our pastor, I think, has a tendency to take too much on herself, so it's important for the deacons to step up and take some of the burden off her shoulders. Cathy is very good at that.

Just so I don't forget, a link to my site. I started building my site with Trellix many years ago, and it was ok, but then I got a copy of M$ FrontPage. So that's what I use now, but there are still many remnants of Trellix floating around. I really ought to just yank it all out and start over.

I was also asked to do publicity for Vacation Bible School this year; what's the best way for a geek to do that? A web site!

Wow. A blog.

The first thing that strikes me, is that this must be the most narcissistic form of computer interaction since, well, ever. Back in the early 90's there were already public mailing lists floating around to join, and a lot of people would join a mailing list on, say, Indiana University basketball, and immediately send out a sixty line email on their life. As if we cared. We were only worried about Alan Henderson's knee.

But apparently enough people did, and do, that reading about someone else's life has become the big internet thing. It seems a lot like Reality TV, except with worse editing.

On the other hand, the only way to have something really excellent is to take the chance on having something really lousy. So here I am.

Now what?