Category: Uncategorized

I won’t claim I’m back up to speed, but all the home email is read, the aggregator is showing only a day’s worth of new items, and I’ve got fewer than ten open browser windows. (I’m not a fan yet of tabbed browsing.) That means that with some focused time (ha!), I could be caught up quickly, and then tackle some work, either personal or professional. I’m still on vacation, but January will be busy, and I’d like to walk in the door on Tuesday ready to go.

Christmas in New York hit all the usual high notes, and a big thanks to all the various family members who made a special effort with the kids. It’s fun to be four years old at this time of year, clearly.

Happy New Year, by the way. I was in bed before 10pm local time, both because the Eve isn’t really a holiday we celebrate and because the wake-up call this morning came at its usual early hour. In fact, the kids’ body clocks are still stubbornly set somewhere between Mountain and Central Time, despite our return to San Francisco. Hope that resolves itself by Tuesday.

I think I’ll be unplugged a few days of the next week. Wish me luck! And Merry Christmas.

What comes around, goes around. I introduced Vin to the Orson Scott Card bolt of lightning known as Ender’s Game, and I shared my copies of Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Shadow with him. But I didn’t know there are even more Ender novels, so I was pleasantly surprised to borrow Xenocide, which I recently finished. Even better news is that there are a total of eight books in this setting, and I’ve only read half of them.

Xenocide, like the others, booms ahead with a story that stretches the mind a bit, without making you work hard on the language. It’s been a while since I read Speaker for the Dead, so it took me a bit to get back into the vagaries of the planet Lusitania. But once there, I was happily turning pages. I found the plot twist that salvages our heros a bit much (faster than light travel), but set in a universe where instantaneous communication (via the ansible) is possible, I suppose you can’t be too picky. And, as with the other Ender books I’ve read, it’s the people that matter. I heard Michael Chabon on the radio this morning, talking about how he hates pigeonholes. The best authors don’t get trapped in one… although I’ve been plenty happy mindlessly turning pages in novels where the author delivers on the same formula time and again. As long I keep mixing it up, I’m happy.

Now that I’ve finished Blue at the Mizzen, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have sailed off into the sunset. Yes, Norton decided to publish three chapters from the unfinished 21st book which O’Brian was working on before he died in 2000, but a score of novels feels like a tidy sum. I also have lots of other books I want to get to, so while I floated comfortably with the Surprise all this time, I am ready to move on. I own all twenty, and I’ve been known to re-read books from time to time, but for now I’ll let Aubrey sail to his flag and his new fleet off South Africa.

If you, too, have read them all but find yourself wanting more, you can join the fanatics at The Gunroom, a collection of fervent readers of the canon whose mailing list volume frightened even me, an information junkie. From the FAQ:

List traffic can be overwhelming — up to a couple hundred messages a day is not unexpected. In fact, heavy volume is the number one reason that people leave the list.

I subscribed a year or two ago for about two weeks, in digest form, and then turned tail and ran. There is always someone reading and rereading the entire series there, all the better to debate the finer points of spotted dog and the trim of the main topgallant staysail. I should fit right in, having read not only “The Canon” but two of his earlier novels and a biography, but I clearly don’t read with enough intent, beyond escape.

From one documentary to the next, it seems. We watched The War Room last night. Though it felt topical with one presidential election recently finished, the documentary film was made in 1993 about the 1992 campaign of then Governor Bill Clinton. What little I knew about the film boiled down to the idea that there was a big sign saying “It’s the economy, stupid.” on the wall of the campaign office. Well, it was one of the three mantras scribbled on a white board, but hardly the unswerving theme of the film, at least.

With James Carville and George Stephanopoulos now firmly ensconced as TV personalities, I am left wondering if the 2008 campaign will see either return to the arena of their greatest triumph. Or can they both live off the 1992 campaign for the rest of their lives, as they are doing now? That may not be fair, especially to the younger man (Stephanopoulos). But I turned on a recent TiVoed Daily Show episode right after the film finished and both Carville and Stephanopoulos were in clips from that night’s section on AIDS (just shy of 4 minutes… not sure if they keep their links working over time, so enjoy it now). Stephanopoulos interviewed Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist about AIDS transmission, and Carville (a self-caricature) explained that he knew a lot about masturbation. Nice of him to share, on national (cable) TV. Overall, a reminder that times change, and not everyone get to keep their chair when the music stops.

At home last weekend, thanks to my wife’s juggling of the DVD queue, we watched Control Room. An eighty-minute documentary about Al Jazeera in the build-up to the Gulf War (2003 version), Control Room did show me things I knew little about, but it wasn’t riveting. Or maybe I was just too tired to keep my eyes open. The most interesting sections featured the American media officer in Central Command, Lt. John Rushing. The military has officers focused on working with the media. Doesn’t that say something? This man was polished, but not slick. He seemed sincere without being naive. He comes off well in the movie. But our military needs press officers?!? From the movie’s website, “Before going to the Middle East, Lt. Rushing worked in Hollywood negotiating script content with big budget studios on behalf of the US military.” Is that a sign of our civilization or something else entirely?

Saw the movie After the Sunset a few weeks ago. Wait for the video. This film feels like a re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), which itself was a re-make of a 1968 movie by the same name. After the Sunset has Salma Hayek going for it, but otherwise it’s not as crisp or as amusing as the Pierce Brosnan version of The Thomas Crown Affair. Clear as mud? Anyway, wait for the video. It’s pleasant, but not more than that.

I woke up early (5:30am) this morning, and noticed the clock was dark. After a moment’s dullness, I realized the power must be out. Short story shorter… the power came back on about 15 minutes ago (~6:30am). I’m curious how widespread this was in San Francisco, but nothing at SFGate and nothing at PG&E. If you don’t have power, hard to use a computer to tell other people, of course, but I’ll be curious just how long the outage lasted. It started sometime between 2:15am (woke up briefly and remember the clock) and 5:30am.

If this is citizen journalism, there’s a reason we have professionals!

I love Christmas.

I’m part of a large family, so all through my childhood, the chaos and excitement compounded. It’s hard to repeat that vibrant experience as you get older, but having kids of your own gets you back in the mood quite quickly. The boy is overdoing it with Feliz Navidad and O Tanenbaum (pre-school concert on Friday), but he’s positively thrumming with excitement about the holiday… and, let’s be honest, the presents.

So, what’s the problem? Buying presents for other people. I’m not a grinch… I love finding just the right present for a family member or friend, but it’s hard to end up in the proper place if you combine the following elements:

• Procrastination, which also makes the experience more expensive (think: shipping!)
• Perfection, because you want the gift to be what the recipient really wants, which means you need to demonstrate you really know the person well enough to match the gift and the recipient
• Presumption, where through giving a list or (not so) subtle hints, the recipient expects they know what will be coming

In sum, I want to give an amazing gift to the right person, but I want it to be a total surprise, and I make that process especially stressful by not focusing on it until, oh, about now.

Normally, that would be an expensive recipe for potential disaster, but my family got smart this year and we’ve all drawn one name out of a hat, and can focus our attention on that one person, guilt-free. So…. Dad, what do you want? If you tell me, then I can’t get it because it won’t be a surprise, so I’ll just guess and hope that the potential gap between gift and desires isn’t too wide. Like every other year!

The other problem with Christmas is that once I start shopping for presents for other people, I get lots of ideas about nifty things that I would enjoy. Nothing I need, but there are some useful ideas at Uncle Mark’s gift guide and also at TidBITS.

When it takes me a few weeks to write up a book I’ve read, there’s little chance I’m going to do more than the minimum when it comes time to note thoughts here. Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World is the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. I pity those who wade into this swirl of characters, history, and interlocked stories at this late juncture. Stephenson, or his publisher, “minds the gap” by including a two page introduction titled “The story thus far…” which is helpful. Still, if you’ve read the earlier volumes (Quicksilver and The Confusion) as I have, System is a worthy read. I won’t summarize 887 pages, but I will say I’m glad there were maps in the hardcover’s endpapers of early 18th-century London, including a higher-scale section detailing the Tower of London, which plays a prominent role in the novel. I needed the maps, and I try and imagine what Stephenson’s workplace must have looked like while he was writing this book. To steep yourself in history, yet live in the modern world, requires an extended period of willful blindness. Or I could just call it focus. Glad to see Stephenson swims in this attribute. Maybe writing it out longhand was the answer. No internet, tempting with its email or RSS reader… hmmmm… RSS (hear Gollum’s “My precioussss” voice).

One web complaint: there are no useful links available beyond the author’s home page because despite the admirable MetaWeb, the rest of Stephenson’s web presence is visually interesting but hard to link to or otherwise address. A pop-up and Flash intro? Not what I would have expected from the author of In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line.