Italy, days 4 and 5

More of Kim's pictures, from Tuesday...












...and Wednesday...

Italy, day 3

A few select photos and videos from Kim's tour (and a couple shots from the balcony of our hotel)...

Italy, days 1 and 2

For anyone not in the know, my job has taken me to Florence for a week, to attend a fancy CHI conference. I got to bring my wife along, so before and after the conference we get to take in some local flavor together.

Before getting here, we experienced two different classes of air travel. First there was the kind we are accustomed to, sardine-like accommodations and enough discomfort to open for any stand-up comedian. For the trip across the Atlantic, though, we were put on a plane seemingly designed for human beings. I might have even caught an hour or two of sleep, which I'm pretty sure nobody has ever done on a sardine-class plane.

Italy, day 1.

I actually didn't take any pictures. But I'll describe our brief time in Rome:

• waiting for trains
• wondering why "Florence" doesn't show up anywhere in the English UI when trying to purchase a train ticket to Florence
  
• train interiors
• train tracks, garbage, grafiti
• from distant to close: grafiti, garbage, train tracks

Someday we'll come to Italy again and see Rome properly. But it wasn't to be this time 'round. Saturday concluded for us by being driven through very narrow, windy roads and arriving at our hotel, the Residenzia Casanuova, and collapsing for the night. We can whole-heartedly recommend staying here to anyone and everyone; it's easily the nicest place we've ever stayed at in Italy. ;^) Really though, we love it here.

Italy, day 2

First things first. A very nice breakfast is provided here, so we had some food before heading out.

I had to savor the cheese both visually and ... eatingly. As with everything else, it was very tasty.

We didn't go very far on our little self-guided tour; our primary mission was to find an ATM so that we could have some euros with which we could buy, among other things, some actual tours and excursions, including visits to some of the museums we saw but didn't yet enter.

Not the real "David", though it isn't far from here...

Lots of impressive statues of lots of impressive people.

We trekked down to the Arno river and back, crossing a couple of very cool bridges.

There's a learning curve to wandering the streets around here but we're picking up on it. Placed in a car here, I'd give the average Utah driver 15, maybe 20 seconds before killing somebody and/or wrecking something very expensive. Thankfully, the people who do drive here are much smarter. Everything's very close-quarters, though. Our camera's wide-angle lens has been very handy so far.

We passed this gigantic and old church (which is right next to a smaller, even older church) on our way out and on the way back. So we saw it both having little to no bearings and having a pretty good sense of direction.

We've got plenty more pictures and will continue to accumulate them I'm sure, and I think they deserve a dedicated album with proper annotations. I'll have to get on that once we get back. But for now I hope these were enjoyable; it's certainly enjoyable being here. :^)


Update: Italy, day 2 (continued)

Just a couple quick pictures from heading out to dinner. First, the cool stairway we take if laziness doesn't prompt us to use the elevator.

And finally, myself enjoying an Italian beer. :^)

Spare bone

My wrist has been hurting for the last few days, enough that I finally went to a doctor for the first time in ... well years, not sure how many. I spend what's probably an unhealthy amount of time with my hands at a keyboard, so I was worried about carpal tunnel syndrome and such. But enough chatter, the point of this message is to share a cool x-ray image. :^)


It turns out that I have some "calcification" going on, some extra bony tissue showing up where it shouldn't. If I move my wrist the wrong way (which is, basically, too far in any direction) this extra chunk starts annoying whatever nerves and stuff that are around it. I'm wearing a brace now and will have to hunt down an orthopedic doctor at some point.

Here's the little bugger highlighted:




I'm not so sure about this whole getting old stuff, I think I liked it better when my body wasn't falling apart, but I think I'll keep at it, see if this getting old business gets any better with age. ...Wait a minute...

Preserve the Ratio!

Not long ago, in brew pub in Salt Lake City, some work buddies and I noticed that the widescreen TVs showing the game (don't ask which game, or even what sport; I don't know) were actually set up correctly. As it turns out, all of us share a pet peeve, namely the practice of buying a fancy widescreen TV, pumping a 4:3 picture into it, and setting it to the wrong display mode, distorting and fattening everything shown.

An iPhone (is that the proper capitalization?) was present, and we determined that "preservetheratio.com" was indeed available, a vacant soapbox from which we could complain about the vile practice that distorts the images so many see every day, a home base upon which we could collect written and photographic accounts of these public displays of stupidity, a domain name which, though basically useless, we could indeed secure and have for our own.

Unlike most bar talk, this actually led to one of us going ahead and registering preservetheratio.com. He hadn't actually been drinking, even. But apparently it was obtained for next to nothing. Upon hearing this, I snapped a few quick pictures in my office and threw together my own personal rant on the topic. It's not the multitude of articles and arguments and pictorials we imagined when beer was present, but for now it's the only content on the site. And it's a little creepy 'cause my picture is sitting right there on the front of a something-dot-com.

Anyway it's pretty silly, and contains more complaining than humor, but here's a link anyhow:
http://www.preservetheratio.com

 

[Edit: many years later, I have no memory of who owned or ran that domain, but it's long gone.  However, it seems I still have a copy of that page available: http://penduin.mine.nu/preservetheratio/ ]

More Shmoe

The Shmoe has his own website now. Not much there yet, and it'll never be pretty.
http://shmoe.mine.nu

...that is all.

Have fun with your internets

This is a dumb story. But I'm overworked, sleep-deprived, and need a break. Some coworkers and I have been writing a new web-based setup for M+ Guardian. (As in, you buy a Guardian appliance from Messaging Architects, plug it in, hit it with a browser the way you configure your router, and set up the system.) Its implementation is quite slick, and we've spent some really long nights on it. Once everything is set up, the appliance will start up its services and begin dutifully making your corporate email safe and unspammy.

But that last screen, nobody gave me any text for what should be said there. The current placeholder is something like "M+ Guardian is set up, you may now do XYZ". Not great. And in our quickie meeting today, nobody gave me anything better, except Thane who jokingly suggested "Have fun with your internets". After the meeting, I scribbled our new internal M+ slogan and an accompanying drawing on the whiteboard.


...And now, on the other side of the picture, the other side of the story. The dude in the scribble is the Shmoe, who apparently doesn't even deserve a "c" in his name. He first appeared in some high school notebooks, in French class. He was meant to be the guy on the hissy, stretched-out cassette tape telling us to listen and repeat... In any case, he's surfaced around the office lately in various situations. This time he's using his beer belly as a table, and looking up what appear to be either boobies or eyeballs on his super-modern computer.

happy = new Year(2008);

There it is again, the end of this year and the beginning of the next. It's only an arbitrary marker in time, which is already measured arbitrarily, but the programmer in me has to stand down for a moment and let the Sol-3-bound human in me enjoy the idea.

So, to anyone and everyone, have a happy New Year!

Happy Halloween!

This was our first Halloween at our own house, and it saw plenty of trick-or-treat traffic.

Our neighbors went all-out with decorations and special effects, which we couldn't match, but we did have a jack-o-lantern I felt mildly clever coming up with, and a cute little skull-on-the-grill display.

Happy All Hallows' Eve!

Approaching Democracy

I swore this blog wouldn't turn into a political soapbox. I'm breaking that for two reasons: I'm not taking any politically-charged sides here, and it's an idea that's simply too good to go unmentioned.

For as much as we throw around the term "democracy", what we (and all other "democratic" nations) have is a republic. We don't make the decisions; we elect people to make the decisions for us. That's no bad thing necessarily, but that layer of indirection has can be very thick and frustrating at times.

http://senatoronline.com.au/

This is brilliant. It's a hack for an existing republic to inject a bit of direct democracy. All registered voters may vote online on any and every issue that passes through the senate. The senator (human or software) then blindly votes accordingly. If the idea works, clones and variations of the system will also get elected, slowly replacing, to whatever extent citizens are comfortable with, the old republic with a true democracy.

Variations that deal with introducing bills in addition to just voting on them could be very interesting. How to best immunize these systems from party poisoning could become key in how useful and effective they might be in the long term. If nothing else, this conjures a mental image of replacing senators with small shell scripts, which should bring a huge smile to any geek's face.

Them's Fightin' Words!

I've put up with a lot of crap since becoming a homeowner, but I don't think I've ever been directly insulted before. That changed yesterday. If I were to try to come up with the optimal, most derogatory insult per syllable, I don't think I could do much better than this:


Are they serious? "Utah driver"! What cruel joke is this?! Suffice to say, I won't be signing up for this particular brand of auto insurance. Not that I'd have considered it anyway, I suppose.

Next up:

• Junk mail from cosmetics companies addressed to "Fugly Resident"
• Church newsletters to "Hell-bound Soul"
• Discount store catalogs to "Dirt-poor Pauper"
• GED pamphlets addressed simply to "Dumbass"
• Cologne and perfume ads to "B.O. McSmelly or current occupant"

I suppose it is possible that most people around here wouldn't take so much offense to being called a "Utah driver". ...But after further reflection, I just don't see how that could be so.

The Best Wurst

That title's a Red Green-ism, by the way. Credit where credit is due. Anyhow, this post is mostly a pointless anecdote, but can also serve as a series of tips for any bratwurst-grilling newbie. :^)

We went to an Independence Day party last night, and I was charged with bringing and preparing the brats. This is a responsibility which I gladly accept anytime, and which I take quite seriously. After all, I'm representing Wisconsin out here. We cheeseheads are a proud, brat-grilling people. We have a rich tailgating culture. Here in Utah, though, there would be no beer dulling the senses of these Latter-Day Saints. Their taste buds would tell no lies. My brats had to stand on their own.

Luckily, I was not without help. A week or two ago, a work buddy introduced me to a local family-owned sausage shop, Colosimo's. A quick drive up towards Salt Lake scored us three packs of high-quality bratwurst. Not to knock the big-name brands; you can get a decent brat anywhere, but these small places survive by being the tastiest, not the most cost-effective and well-distributed. Not surprisingly, mom-and-pop sausage shops are a bit harder to come by in Utah than in Wisconsin.

Now, to someone like me, it's pretty non-controversial that in order to grill the best wurst, one ought to soak them in beer and onions at some point(s) during their preparation. Pre-boiling is common practice, for good reason. I didn't dare go that route though, as I didn't know if the various Mormons I'd be feeding would be comfortable with it. As it turned out, nobody objected to their brat having a good soak in some appropriately-patriotic Samuel Adams lager.

Cutting up an onion was murder on my eyes, but that was good - it meant the little bugger was potent enough to quickly impart its flavors to the hot brats swimming around in the pan. Surface area's the name of the game, the more thin slices the better. Tears of joy, right? :^)

I also made sure to capitalize on my tendency to micro-manage the grill. Rather than turning once or twice, I made sure every brat got plenty of rotation, including being balanced sideways. (You can actually see that going on in Proby's picture up there.) A curved brat can't be cooked perfectly evenly, but it's pretty easy to do better than two charred sides and pink everywhere else.

Using cheese as a brat condiment is a very Wisconsin-y touch. If you ask me, get plenty of colby-jack melted between the bun and the sausage, and there's no need for mustard or sauerkraut or anything else. Cheddar was more popular yesterday, and I won't argue with cheddar. That would be folly. Point is, cheese and brats go together like ... actually, I can't think of much else that goes together that well. Beer and brats, maybe. Or beer and cheese. Oh, got it. Cheese and bratwurst go together like fireworks and the 4th of July.

I received a whole bunch of compliments on the brats, so I must have done something right. We got to digest while watching lots of pretty fireworks go off, both amateur and professional. Celebrating the nation's birthday with grilled meat and explosions, who could ask for more? :^)

Prior Art

One of the memes buzzing around the hippie geek community lately is a way to stick it to those greedy corporations who think they can own math and such, and who bully everybody with patent infringement lawsuit threats and backroom licensing agreements. How? By brain-dumping ideas publicly. If proof exists of prior art or even that an idea has been published, a patent on it can be struck down.

I don't have any brilliant ideas, but i have some mundane ones that are much more clever than half the crap that gets awarded patents these days. So here they are, at least the ones I can remember off the top of my head, and if any greedy corporation is reading, go ahead and make these things happen, but you can't have patents on 'em. Not for long anyway. They're braindead ideas, documented here as prior art.

Video Projector With Smart Auto-Adjust
Implementation 1: Infrared beacons or reflective tape is built-in or can be attached to all 4 corners of any reflective screen, a small infrared camera in the projector (much like the one in a Wii controller) detects the positions of the screen corners, and software distorts and adjusts the projected image to be the correct shape and size.
Implementation 2: No beacons, but a small camera built into the projector feeds data to software that scans for a big, bright, 4-sided polygon, and adjusts the projected image. Probably the better implementation for most cases. A single unit could be capable of using both methods.

Product Placement in Photo/Video/Art Sharing Sites
My friend's Flickr account contains a photo of someone clearly holding a branded pop can. He deserves ad revenue-per-view as much as advertising agencies do. Better yet, pay individuals for stuff like this and stop polluting broadcast and print media with loud and obnoxious ads.

Non-Fling Fingernail Clipper
The otherwise-standard clipper has a soft, spongy clamp behind the blades, which holds a clipped nail until released, rather than ejecting it at a random, high-velocity trajectory.

Pi Compression
(see earlier post)

AI-Engineered Codecs
(see earlier post)

Incompetence Profile: Dish Network

Oh Dish Network, how I loathe thee. Let me count the ways...

Advertising: incompetent
Lies, damned lies, and Dish Network promises. Free installation, they say! "Setup fee" though, that's different. And not mentioned until you've signed up. Up to 4 receivers free, they say! "Free" apparently means "extra $5 a month" in certain contexts. Only $30 a month, they say! Well, $40. Same thing right? $45 if you'd like local channels. No hidden fees, they say! Well, except for a $10 per month "programming access fee" if the phone line isn't hooked up. Even if the installation techs promised that's not the case. Which brings us to...

Installation technicians: incompetent
New house, no TV sets there where they will be yet. Not a problem, says the phone rep. Different story in person. They only have a big utility van full of equipment; it would be silly for them to include a little TV for testing. So my wife, already wasting her day waiting for these jokers, had to drive back to the apartment, grab our small TV, and drive it back, while these guys poked around on the roof and in the utility room, where they knocked out our DSL just to be cute. "One dual receiver in the bedroom, another in the basement" was the order. But my earning-her-3rd-college-degree wife probably didn't know what she was talking about, so they called me at work. Yes, I built a DVR so we want a dual tuner downstairs. As for the other, we might add a TV somewhere else at some point, and the dual tuner costs the same as a single anyway. Bedroom, basement. You install, I'll take it from there. So, naturally, they installed one in the bedroom, and the other ...in the office, two floors away from the basement. My wife was understandably sick of dealing with them by then, so I sorted things out when I got home, no thanks to their unmarked cables. Well, to be fair, a few cords had labels on one end. Not correct labels, but still.

Phone maze design: incompetent
I don't even need to go into details here. All phone mazes are defective by design. Any organization that installs such an abomination is incompetent. No exceptions, no excuses. We'd all honestly rather be on hold listening to muzak if the alternative is trying to appease some robot telling us to punch numbers and speak and roll over.

Customer service: incompetent
Beyond the phone maze await more robots, this time in the form of human beings in India reading from a flow-chart script. The phrase "I do apologize for the inconvenience sir" is used as punctuation, and to fill the silence when calling up the next part of the script. I'm not looking for an apology. Just take this fee, which you promised wouldn't be here, off my bill.

Hardware engineering: incompetent
Ahh, a nice compact dual tuner. What's this? S-Video output? Cool beans! Oh wait, it only works on the RF-remote tuner, which would by definition be elsewhere in the house, tuned to a UHF channel. Well, whatever. Composite's not so bad. No home automation control port, huh? That sucks, but I guess I can get an infrared blaster for my MythTV box. Oh, lovely. The tuner's IR sensor is fickle and ignores digits when it feels like it. Great job guys, wouldn't want to build a sensor that's a few % forgiving, 'cause surely your $3 made-in-Taiwan remote control powered by two AA batteries has more accurate signal timings than a friggin' PC motherboard.

Software engineering: incompetent
Finally, everything's set up and mostly working. Wait, what? We recorded a friggin' screensaver with a bouncing Dish logo instead of our shows? Every night in the wee hours, program guide updates are downloaded and the tuner reboots and comes up not with the last-tuned channel, but with this ridiculous "press select to continue" mode. This also happens if you don't press any buttons for 4 hours or so. Augh! There's an inelegant workaround I can and do use, but would it really be that hard to just boot up into the last tuned channel? Or update channel listings without a reboot? (What is this, Windows 95?) Or allow numbers to be punched in instead of ignoring all but a "select" signal? Or not have that useless screensaver mode in the first place?

It smells a bit of conspiracy theory, but Dish offers their own, reportedly-awful DVR (for a monthly fee, of course) which could explain the hardware and software issues that make it such a pain in the ass to set up a Dish receiver with an external recorder. Who knows if DirecTV would have been any better; their pricing lies were even more infuriating than Dish's. Don't you just love the "freedom" of choosing between two corporate overlords?

Dish Network. We put the F.U. in T.V.

The Great Beeping of '07

My wife and I got home later than usual last night, welcomed by six smoke alarms blaring just as loudly as their manaical speakers would allow. According to the neighbors, this had been going on for a good long while. Just to get it out of the way, no, there was no fire. There were no dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. There was just noise. Massive, massive decibel levels of noise.

I flipped the breaker ever so helpfully named "Smokeys" or some lame thing, and we set about hunting down each of the unholy ear-gouging devices. Grab, twist, pull it down, yank the AC plug, flip open the side and rip out the 9-volt. As if to add to the surreal nature of this process of systematically finding and killing these hateful abominations, several of them hissed with static and gasped with high-frequency squeals as the last watts bled from their capacitors. Die! Why won't they just DIE?!

Our poor cat was already neurotic and jittery, so this whole episode was just terrific for her. I hate to think what being showered in that acoustic magma feels like after hours and hours, let alone for a critter of super-sensitive hearing. My tinnitus is noticeably worse, my wife could barely focus on her homework, and our neighbors would be quite justified in either pitying us or hating us, all because someone thought it would be smart to design a system of smoke alarms that:

1. Never shut up no matter how long they're raised
2. Connect to each other and all go off if one is triggered
   
3. Are each, individually, deafeningly loud
4. Cannot be turned off remotely by cutting power
5. Give no hint as to which unit's faulty sensor started the whole mess

Yes. Brilliant.

So far, home ownership has been just fantastic. What's next, I wonder? Wait, I know. All the light bulbs simultaneously explode, raining sparks down on carpet and furniture and starting fires on every floor. The smoke alarms aren't replaced yet so nobody is warned, the pipes all magically route natural gas instead of water, and the entire place goes up in a huge plume of smoldering annihilation. Oh, and then our insurance company turns out to be a subsidiary of Enron and vanishes without a trace, our cat miraculously survives only to sue the bejesus out of us, and the homeowners association fines us for burning without a permit.

mv /home/apartment /home/house

Moving sucks. Never again, at least not until we can afford to hire movers. All my stuff and all my wife's stuff is at our new home, though most of it's still globbed on the main floor, waiting for us to muster the energy and the giving-a-crap to move things to more sensible places.

I did figure out a good way of explaining RAM and some other concepts to people who aren't computer literate, though. RAM is your computer's tables and counters. If you've got lots of counter space, you can do things. Things like put down a plate, remove the lid of a peanut butter jar and set it down, little luxuries like that. When all your counter space is full, you need to start swapping. Typically you have to swap stuff from the table (RAM) to the floor (hard disk). Holding things in your hands (CPU registers) is handy for juggling a few things at a time, but you have to set them down sooner or later.

The analogy is silly, but its implications are even sillier...

When we first moved in, all our stuff was compactly stored in two rooms on the main floor - the beginning of a disk. We're now seeking to fragment our housedrive on purpose, moving things bit by bit off into the far corners of our available space.

The seek time on our house is ironically much slower than in the old apartment, even though we have three platters as opposed to just one. Then again, the head count hasn't increased so that still makes sense.

DMA would be awesome. If things could get from any floor space to any counter or table space without having to be carried by our sore CPU registers, that would save a lot of time and effort, which I suppose is the entire point of DMA.

Wouldn't it be nice if extra hard disk space could be turned into RAM just by putting a table there? Not swap, but actual, useful RAM. Growing extra registers would be very useful too. Most people would just wind up using them to play solitaire though.

Our cat is a virus who will indiscriminately puke on both RAM and the hard disk. Her runtime is some sort of virtual machine which doesn't make any distinction between the two, it's all just trottable and sleepable surface area.

~ mv /home/apartment /home/house
Permission denied.
~ sudo mv /home/apartment /home/house
~

"Sudo" must be the 16-foot truck we rented. It was powerful and a little intimidating to use. A person could get used to that level of power and potential disaster, but most of us should stay in user mode most of the time, and only fiddle with the stuff we own.

Does Not Compute

I grew up with an Apple IIe. Six expansion slots, color graphics, dual 5.25" floppy drives, but most importantly, BASIC in firmware. I was writing programs before I even really understood what that meant. To use the computer was to program it, and I couldn't have been happier. Sure, pre-compiled programs like Print Shop and Mario Bros were fun, but making my own stuff, that's what I liked best. That's where the magic was.

I was really, really lucky. I grew up at just the right time. To own a computer was to be a computer enthusiast. It wasn't a means to an end; the point of having the thing was to mess around with it. It could certainly be used to do useful work, but it was every bit as common (and easy) to use it as a toy.

(Begin hearing the "old man" voice in your head at this point.)

Modern computing does not compute! Computers nowadays don't come with any (programming language) interpreters built into ROM. Or pre-installed on their hard disks, as might be more appropriate. The closest you can come to writing programs out-of-the-box today is to use a featureless text editor to write some javascript and run it in a web browser.

<script type="text/javascript">
alert("Hello World, this sucks!");
</script>

Now, the way I learned to be a programmer isn't the only right way. But doing BASIC, being taught C, and picking up on everything else was a pretty fun and natural progression. There are entire college computer science tracks now that don't teach C at all anymore, instead using Java or something. It's not bad to learn Java, but I would argue that learning C is more important, if what you care about is computer science. If you care about crafting cookie-cutter corporate apps quickly, Java's where it's at. But if you care about what's going on, or if you like the idea of a computer as a toy, C is really important. The rub is that it's an awful language to write your first program in. My brain, anyway, wasn't ready for it until I'd done something simpler first.

That's where BASIC came in, and where something like Python could come in today. A person's first program shouldn't be graphical. It shouldn't be run in a web browser. It would be nice if it didn't have to import any libraries. And it would be great if there was a realtime interpreter console, something to try out commands and code chunks before saving them in a file. Apple's flavour of BASIC did all of that, and Python does too.

Python is free in all senses of the word, and runs on any platform. The only problem is, it's not just waiting there on any computer one might buy. Before you can do anything with it, you must learn of its existence, find it, download it, and install it. To me, that's tragic. That's depriving little 5-year-old me's all over the world of something really special. It would be trivial to include in any desktop operating system, and could be presented much more nicely than BASIC was back in the day. In the Start menu, or the Apple menu, or on the desktop, or at whatever handy spot user consults regularly, there ought to be a "Create Programs" menu/folder/whatever. It should contain an interpreter, a decent text editor, a language reference, and a quick start guide to explain what those other things are and how to use them. Why isn't this done?

I understand there's not much consumer demand for this kind of thing. Joe Schmoe wants to buy a computer in order to click around on web pages and print term papers, not as a toy to write his own programs for. But I think that could change, if it was widely understood that software can be made by individual people in a matter of minutes. Sure, it won't be the same as software that comes from big corporations on 18-month release cycles, but why does that matter? MySpace pages, YouTube videos, and blogs, aren't the same as designer-comissioned websites, Hollywood films, and professional journalism. It doesn't matter. Joe Schmoe cares about that stuff anyway.

Microsoft, Apple, Dell, HP, somebody... Put Python on the desktop! Add a notice that you don't provide Python support, with a link to python.org, and you can forget all about it. It wouldn't even have to be Python, that's just my opinion of a good introductory programming language. But for cripe's sake, make it happen! There should be a way to be introduced to programming on every computer out there. The fact that there isn't, just doesn't make sense. It's illogical. It doesn't add up. ... Oh, surely there's a phrase that explains the situation.

Token Microsoft Rip

I'm feeling sick today, which has several direct consequences. Firstly, I bet I'm wicked-good at Tetris. Haven't tested that, but generally the worse I feel, the more mad spatial skills I possess. Secondly, and more to the point, my brain scatters when I try to convey a message. It logically follows that this is a perfect time for a blog post. :^)

I was complaining to a friend that a link he sent wouldn't work for me, on either my workstation (GNU/Linux) or my other test box (Mac OSX-point-something). I conjectured that the site authors assume a homogenous world comprised only of those who have drunk the Microsoft kool-aid. Rather than to stay on-topic, I was compelled to rant thusly:

The Windows keys were just the first step, you know. "Vista" keyboards will have no letters, but instead, pictures of various barnyard animals. When the user presses one, a soothing Microsoftie voice will say, "The cow goes, 'Moo'!" And then the system will reboot.

I had gone almost two days without teasing Microsoft about their depressingly shitty software, and maybe it's just my illness-ridden state of mind that leads me to find it amusing, but the idea of a barnyard-noises keyboard to compliment the shiny-jingling-keys UI was too delicious not to share. ...You know, with ...all two of you who will read this.

Unanger

I haven't been a faithful viewer of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart or its younger sibling The Colbert Report, but every once in a while I'll catch something on one of them that really hits home. Mixing political news with comedy is really healthy, I think, and certainly has made the news easier to stomach on those particularly groan-worthy days.

The other day, Stewart had on a guest author, Mike Huckabee, and his book "From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 Stops to Restoring America's Greatness". If I may paraphrase / butcher his own words, Huckabee is "conservative, but not angry about it". He talked about how our elected officials often get distracted with politics and power at the expense of practical matters, and in so doing are failing at their duties to help their people and their homeland. His passing comment about being conservative but not angry about it was a good light-bulb moment for me.

Politically, I would label myself progressive, if I were to pick one label, and as often as not during the last several years, I've been pretty angry about it. Looking at things practically is much more effective, though, and would let me have less heated and more fruitful arguments.

A good example might be my beef with the restrictions on stem cell research. We could argue about when life begins and the ethics of using of embryonic cells until we're blue in the face, but the reasons I think the research should be given some liberty are actually entirely practical. My wife is type-1 diabetic, and I want us to grow old together. I know and have known several cancer patients. I'm fully aware that stem cell research is no guaranteed silver bullet for magically healing these people, but I think that their lives are worth a great deal of effort in trying to save. We owe it to ourselves and to each other not to dismiss or over-restrict science with this much potential. Now, I have no doubt that practical arguments can be made against my position as well, but I'd rather discuss and weigh those than political and religious arguments; all those seem to accomplish is to stir up anger.

In any case, I have a late New Year's resolution, and that is to be less angry where I could instead be practical. Here's hoping a few politicians give the idea a try, too.