Month: September 2007

• Actually: A Rant, An Announcement, and a Plea
  another satisfied MovableType user — erm, no. I have no idea why people have kept using MT: works great for Daring Fireball (no comments) but why bother upgrading? MT2 did all you need for that.
  (tags: movabletype wordpress markets customerservice software design)

from a comment on New shelves:

I’ve found that if I have a place for a thing, it’ll tend to go there. If I don’t have a place for a thing, it’ll go anywhere there’s space, and I may never find it again.

These crush the original iPod ear buds like a rotten grape. They are a little heavier and nowhere near as elegant, but you’ll get much better sound (real bass!!1!) at lower volumes (better battery performance?). And they come with a whole suite of in-ear fittings to make sure they work for you, none of this “one size fits all” jive.

Deal of the Day: Shure E2c Sound Isolating Earphones:

List Price: $99.99
Deal Price: $39.99 You Save: $60.00 (60%)

Shure’s E2c in-ear headphones are tiny, lightweight, and designed to sonically outperform most ear-bud-style headphones. With high-energy drivers in distinctive enclosures, the E2c produces high-quality sound with excellent isolation from background noise. Expires Sep 18, 2007

• Eurobike Awards 2007 – Top Picks (TreeHugger)
  Hmm, I’d be more enthused if it used more accessible/less energy intensive materials. I think the belt drive is long-overdue . . . .
  (tags: cycling environment energy markets)
• People For the American Way – Buying a Movement
  This is old — from 1996 — but I wonder how dated it is? I suspect all that has changed is the dollar amounts.
  (tags: politics values culture)

but a good day sailing, well that’s another thing entirely.

I took a sailing checkout at the Center for Wooden Boats today on a Blanchard Jr Knockabout. I wish I could link to a picture, but there are all of two I can find, neither of them worth sharing. Looks like I better take some of my own.

The checkout was supposed to be a lesson/refresher and it was supposed to be yesterday. So we were a little crossed up. But when the instructor learned that I had done a lot of sailing in my yout’ he turned it into a checkout, gave me the boat and some brief course instructions — “head for the red buoy, round that and come back to the dock, see if there’s enough wind to bring her in under sail.”

View Larger Map
The wind was negligible, given the considerable wind shadow, but once I got out a bit, things picked and I remembered why I liked sailing so much and why I had missed it.

I would have passed the checkout, perhaps, but for my unfamiliarity with the jib: I have never sailed with one, so it took a bit of extra mental muscle to get used to it. So we have a follow-up for next weekend and I look to be ready to checkout the smaller gems of CWB’s livery fleet.

it’s really pretty surprising that I can’t find any pictures of these boats. They really are treasures, especially given Seattle’s maritime heritage. Even some crummy digital snapshots would be useful . . .

ev’rybody had kung pao chicken . . .

you know, you can keep that going

and it was finger-lickin’
ev’rybody had indigestion
and no one answered the question.

Now playing: Knuckle Down from the album “English Settlement” by XTC

I found the complete version of this today.

“Stardust, Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie Book 1 of 4” (Neal Gaiman)

I loved the book, want to see the movie, and had no idea the illustrated version was so wonderful.

Now playing: Thanks For Christmas by Three Wise Men (XTC) [yeah, it’s early, but so what?]

Glenn Greenwald – Political Blogs and Opinions – Salon:

The Fred Kagans and his dad [Donald] and his brother [Robert] and his wife [Kimberly] and his best friend Bill Kristol sit back casually demanding more wars, demanding that our troops be denied any relief, demanding that the President call for other families to volunteer to fight in their wars — all “as an intellectual or emotional exercise,” as [Senator Jim] Webb put it.
That’s all revolting enough. But to then watch Fred Kagan sit around opposing Senator Webb’s attempts to relieve some of the strain on our troops — all because it would require too much paperwork to figure out and because they haven’t yet won Fred Kagan’s war and thus deserve no breaks — is almost too much to bear. But it is worth forcing oneself to observe it, as unpleasant as it might be, because within this ugly dynamic lies much of the explanation for what has happened to our country since the 9/11 attack, and the personality type that continues to drive it today.

I didn’t realize one could have the organ that causes one to feel shame removed. Evidently, you can. How else do these heartless, spineless, gutless bastards get through a day?

Continue reading “who are these people?”

Shut It Down October 17, 2007:

It starts down here with us, not some monied org with a sidebar agenda. We don’t need to go anywhere. We don’t need to spend anything. Just stay home. We believe that October 17th would be a great day. The 25th Anniversary of The Solidarity Movement protests and strikes that shut down Poland, and brought down Communist/Soviet rule. We all need a day off… why not take it off together?

Out here in the Soviet of Washington, it will be interesting to see what traction this gets. The risk for members of my old union, the SEIU, will be pretty high: the UW, bastion of liberalism, may not look kindly on a one-day worker outage.