Jason Kottke pointed to the Bacontarian, a site devoted to one of my favorite foods: bacon! Our cafeteria’s delivery guy somehow managed to forget bacon yesterday, and it won’t be available until Wednesday. How will we survive breakfast?!
Oh, well, at least we have sausage.
I just used the movies search trick on Google to see what’s playing in our area. I have one word of advice for every other movie listings site out there: speed. It took me all of 30 seconds to find the times and information about the film. This on a 56k link. There’s no reason for me to use any other movie search.
Hint for Yahoo! Movies and other such slow sites: ditch the advertisements, dumbass, they’re slowing you down.
Meryl pointed out In2Books, a program to pair young readers with adult pen pals which began in the Washington, D. C., schools. The adult reads the same book the children do, and they correspond about it. Perhaps they will find that, as Thomas Jefferson did, I cannot live without books.
Deena and the girls have been reading the Little House series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Turns out we have a gap in our collection; so while we wait for their delivery, we finished Stuart Little. The girls, the Little Sister in particular, love singing along with Oliver!, so I tried Oliver Twist, but that didn’t work. Mr. Charles Dickens never found a word he couldn’t squeeze into a sentence somewhere, eventually finding his point somewhere between the beginning of his artful construction and its punctuation, on a course more meandering than not, but placing the antecedent somewhere towards the end of the sentence, with the prepositions scattered before it, renders his meaning hard for little ears to capture.
So they’re reading Alice in Wonderland.
Country Walkers sells walking tours that for some reason remind me of the picnic scene outside Florence in A Room with a View.
From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.
One of these summers we’d like to visit Prince Edward Island, for the obvious reason. I wonder how the girls would do on this kind of trip. They’ve certainly held up to a lot of walking.
E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables are in the public domain. You can read them at the libraries of Gutenberg Project or the University of Michigan, among others.
The Big Sister made this doll yesterday.
Maybe the question to ask is not did a four-year-old paint these, but why do people pay so much for abstract works? I’m quite confident that those paintings could be by a child, but I’m not so confident that abstract works deserve any of the attention lavished on them.
Little Miss Marla Olmstead’s been well-promoted.
Besides, who lets their kids play with oil paints? Do you know how hard that is to get out of the carpet?
The Sisters were discussing theology the other day. The Church sent us an offering envelope for Easter, along with the mass schedule for Holy Week. I’ve been using it as a bookmark, in lieu of any other scrap of paper. It must have fallen out of my book, for I overheard the Sisters talking about where God is.
Jim McGee points to a nice set of lists of passwords not to use. Another set is available at dictionary.com, though Answers.com’s might be easier to reference.
Me, I keep mine on the refrigerator.
In the Constitution’s Commerce clause, the Congress is granted the power
To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
In the same document’s Fifth Amendment, the Federal government may not confiscate property:
nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
The 14th Amendment extends this prohibition to the States.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
Both the Commerce clause and the takings clause are perverted by the field of economics. The Constitution grants specific, limited powers, or forbids infringement of the citizen’s rights and privileges. Government’s scope is limited. Economics takes as its subject the full compass of human activity. By interpreting “commerce” as any economic activity, or “public use” as any economic benefit, the intent of the Constitution is reversed: the power of the government becomes unbounded.
It is not solely the Court’s responsibility to interpret, or misinterpret, the Constitution. It is also ours. If we permit our representatives in Congress assembled, or in our State and local assemblies, to engorge the government on our rights, we have only ourselves to blame.
This raised quite a few interesting consumer technology questions. Ordinarily, for example, one needs a credit card (and good credit) to secure a cell phone. “The Amish pay in cash,” explained the merchant, who, along with most Amish-friendly shopkeepers, didn’t want his name used. “We normally ask for a driver’s license for the purpose of identification when we activate cellular service - of course, the Amish don’t have driver’s licenses. They weren’t able to get phones for several months, since we weren’t allowed to open accounts without driver’s licenses. So we had to make a policy change to accommodate them. We ended up asking for another form of identification. But the Amish don’t believe in photography, so we couldn’t get a photo ID. Eventually we told them to get Pennsylvania state IDs without photographs.”
I guess there will be exceptions to the REAL ID Act.
“Look Who’s Talking,” by Howard Rheingold (Wired, vol. 7, no. 01, January 1999), is a very interesting piece on the response of the Amish to technological changes. He writes,
[A] dispute over the role of the phone was the principal issue behind the 1920s division of the Amish church, wherein one-fifth of the membership broke away to form their own church.
They are selective in their choice of tools. Like Luddites, they often characterized as being against the new because it is new. Instead, the Amish ask what effect a particular tool will have on the community.
“When the telephone first came out here, people put them in their homes,” explained Moses. “But they were party lines. One time a woman overheard two other women gossiping about her. She objected. That wasn’t what we wanted for our families or our community, so the bishops met and home telephones were banned.”
I had heard the same story from several other Amish - in fact, this story seemed to be a key part of community mythology. A writer named Diane Zimmerman Umble, who grew up in Lancaster County and had family roots in the Plain orders, traced the story to its origin, a 1986 memoir written by an Old Order Amishman born in 1897. As a graduate student, Zimmerman Umble started investigating Amish community telephones for a course on contemporary social theory, and ended up writing a book on the subject, Holding the Line: The Telephone in Old Order Mennonite and Amish Life.
The Amish consideration of the social effects of tool use reveals that we’re often inconsiderate in our use of tools.
How often do we interrupt a conversation with someone who is physically present in order to answer the telephone? Is the family meal enhanced by a beeper? Who exactly is benefiting from call waiting? Is automated voicemail a dark hint about the way our institutions value human time and life? Can pagers and cell phones that vibrate instead of ring solve the problem? Does the enjoyment of virtual communities by growing numbers of people enhance or erode citizen participation in the civic life of geographic communities?
When I was reading 1901, I was struck by the frequent use of “indeed.” It was anachronistic.
Indeed, the word sticks out like a sore thumb in contemporary use.
Bill Bumgarner wrote
Since giving away my iPod Shuffle to my wife a few weeks ago, I have had need of a portable storage device. Never before, but now I do. Go figure.
and proceeded to discuss storing an encrypted disk image on a USB flash disk.
Where I’ve lived has informed what I like in a place.
How I’ve moved around has as well. When I was younger, I was driven in a car; I have fond memories of the wayback of a station wagon. But what sticks in my mind is walking or riding my bike.
The last time we went car shopping, the most annoying use of the option package was Ford’s. Certain colors were only available with the V8 and towing package, and the V8 was only available with other things that we’d rather not have. The end result was that the price jumped $6,000 or so for things we didn’t want to buy, and Ford lost a potential sale. This time the annoyance factor is all Honda’s.
The Honda Odyssey comes in a number of trim flavors, between $25,195 and $38,495. The annoying feature is the leather seats. We don’t like them. We really don’t like them. But in order to get nifty features like variable cyclinder management, which you need for somewhat acceptable fuel economy, or stability assist, which prevents fishtailing, you have to get leather seats. I’d prefer not to choose between a better vehicle and cloth seats. I wonder what the lost profit is from not including cloth seats in those models.
I have a simple test for determining the quality of a vendor. Of course, I have no budget, and few listen to me, so my test does not see much use. But if you wonder at the intricacies of buying computing equipment, here’s the test.
Is their supporting documentation privileged? If so, it’s not worth your time or money.
That is all.
If checking the documentation is too hard, here’s another test that you can apply using only software press releases. Does it contain the words “enterprise” or “robust”? If so, they most likely mean it has a robust scent.
My brother gave us a bottle of Château Morrisette’s Sweet Mountain Laurel for Christmas. I like this: it tastes of Concord grapes.
A unique and refreshingly sweet dessert style wine made from Native American grape varieties. A firm acidity balances the natural sugars, producing a crisp finish with aromas of freshly picked grapes.
Perhaps one day we New York residents will be able to order it.
A commentator on NPR tells us what word we should use instead of jihad.
Have you noticed that realtor websites do not provide you with the most important piece of information about a property, the location? This is the hook to get their 5%. When they sell, or attempt to sell, the properties, they use easily comparable attributes such as square footage, acreage, room quantities, and so forth. Without speaking with an agent, the most precise location information you can find is the school system and town. Which leaves you, the buyer, in the position of shopping for houses based on architectural characteristics, such as curb appeal, rather than the property’s place in the world.
It may appear that the market demands contempory “colonials” with 4 bedrooms and 2 baths, but those are secondary concerns. What is being bought is the location.
Somewhere in Chicago, there’s a big wirelessed mall.
More than 18,000 daily visitors who frequent the restaurants, food court, train station, retail stores and common areas of The Merchandise Mart — the world’s largest commercial building — and 350 W. Mart Center will now be able to use laptop computers and personal digital assistants to wirelessly connect to the Internet and corporate networks at speeds 50 to 100 times as fast as a dial-up connection. SBC Communications, Inc. (NYSE: SBC) today announced that SBC FreedomLink Wi-Fi service is available throughout The Merchandise Mart, creating the largest SBC hot spot in the city.
So, if you’re in the area, and you have SBC DSL, and you want to tote your computer to the mall, you can get on-line for a measly $1.99 per month. Now if we could just convince the clothing stores to place benches and power outlets next to the dressing rooms…
Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government by Evan McKenzie
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein
A Sense of History: The Best Writing from American Heritage by