Millionaire's Blues

Wednesday, February 1, 2006 10:51:24 PM

Okay, remember the other day when I snarked about that the dude who invented many of the key facts in his best-selling autobiography? Whether his book was full of lies or truth, whether he got caught or got off scot-free, whether Oprah supported him or (as happened) she had him back on her show just so she could spend a whole hour telling him what an a*****e he is...he still gets to keep all the dough he made off of the second-best-selling book of 2005.

Well, I might have spoken too soon. James Frey is being sued by a social worker who had recommended the book to substance-abusers, and a New York woman is mobilizing a class-action suit for disgruntled readers who want their $15 back, with similar suits being filed in other states. It also looks as though he won't be getting a half a million bucks from Warner Brothers, because they're backing out of the film version.

The topper (which provoked this post) was the news that his agent has now dropped him.

I stress that I have no place in my heart for schadenfreude. I'm not even certain that I can actually spell it correctly. Hang on...hey, cool! Got it right on the first try. That ninety-nine cents I spent on the "Avenue Q" song really paid off.

Nonetheless, shortly after this latest domino fell I couldn't help but think of the scene in "The Jerk" when Navin Johnson's meteoric success arrives at the crash-and-burn phrase. And then I pictured an unshaven Frey shuffling out of his agent's office in his bathrobe, shouting "I don't need you! I just need me! And the chair, and the lamp, and the paddle-ball game...and this spare PowerBook battery! And that's all I need! The chair, the lamp, the paddle-ball game, the battery, oh, and this pad of Post-Its. But that's all!!! The chair, and the lamp, and..."

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The Marryin' Man, Part 4 - The Service

Thursday, February 2, 2006 11:55:50 PM

Too, too busy to do a proper post, but I need to put something in before midnight to make it to the end of my "something every day before I leave for Mexico" pledge. So: here's the full text of the wedding service I wrote and officiated for Shawn and Lesa.

Expect sparse posts between now and next weekend, if any. I'll be on the MacMania IV cruise and Internet access will be a question mark.

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Bobbing Along the Pacific

Sunday, February 5, 2006 7:06:44 AM

Just a quickie, posted from the good ship Oosterdam, currently steaming south to...well, wherever it's headed. Mexico, somewhere. If the owners of this ship refuse to trust me enough to take the helm then I can't be bothered to learn where we're going.

Yesterday I was back in San Diego for the first time since 1999, when I spent five days there attending Comic-Con International. It's amazing; the brain effortlessly divides the entire planet into two zones labeled "Been There" and "Absolute Cypher," and the fact that I had walked these streets before totally changed my enitre relationship with the neighborhood.

What a stroke of luck that my hotel was where it was, too. The Westin was next door to mall and immediately adjacent to a post office and a Macy's, and so the letter that I needed to mail and the total lack of any sort of belt in my luggage ceased to be the enormous question marks that had burdened me throughout an anxious flight westward.

The mall was also able to sell me a pack of rubber bands (one needed to keep my pocket notebook closed), a Nalgene water bottle (if you want to drink more than eight ounces of any liquid on a cruise ship, you'd better either have big hands, bring something to drink from, or not be self-conscious about slurping the genesis of a .12 blood-alcohol reading out of a big plastic pineapple), and a bottle of a name-brand stomach remedy.

Yes, I am a stupid tourist, and therefore I am indeed bringing Pepto-Bismol to Mexico Just In Case.

I was hoping to harass the local underwater wildlife, so two waterproof one-use cameras were happily put on the tab. And it wasn't until just before I finished packing that I unzipped my silicone earbud headphones and discovered that one of the little rubber buds was missing. A sharp-edged plastic tube just an eight of an inch in diameter seems like just the sort of thing you shouldn't be jabbing deep inside your ear canal (plus, you lose a lot of bass response without it) so I had to pick up another pair.

The good news upon arrival was that I paid no penalty by not choosing my shore excursions until, oh, 5:50 PM the night before we sailed. So: there will be snorkeling, and there will be a day at a (hopefully) rather spectacular beach.

But that's years away. Tomorrow, I will spend seven, yes, seven hours giving talks. Oh, and the first one stats at 8:30 AM, a time of day that I've historically had absolutely no luck with.

Plus the Southeast-moving ship will cross into a new time zone shortly. So the clocks will move forward an hour and I'll lose yet another hour of sleep.

Honest to God...I don't know whether I should feel more sorry for myself or my poor students. As the designated teacher, can I assume that what I'm teaching is kindergarten? This would mean that I can order the entire room to put their heads on their desks for an hourlong nap. I see nothing in my contract prohibiting this. Nothing at all.

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And then, this is when Courage beat out Coffee.

Sunday, February 5, 2006 3:45:13 PM

Folks, I am giving a talk on AppleScript. I have been talking for 6 hours with one hour break for lunch. I may snap, or I may be seeing God.

Will let you know which.

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Surely On This Side Of Jerusalem, None Suffer As I Suffer

Sunday, February 5, 2006 11:31:44 PM

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you've been showing compassion in any form towards your fellow Man today -- you gave all of your change to a homeless person and prayed that they would escape the sub-freezing temperatures predicted for this evening, for example, or perhaps someone asked you "What do you think of my new hairstyle?" and you declined to say "It looks like a cow ate a whole bag of Skittles and then **** all over your head" -- please just sort of send this window into the background and read it tomorrow. You're going to want a full night's sleep and a good breakfast inside you for this.

You think you've got what it takes to offer an appropriate level of sympathy. But my dear, you delude yourself. You are being ushered into a hotel conference room, full with confidence that Simon, Paula and Randy will be bowled over by your siezure-influenced rendition of "The Night They Invented Champagne." And fifteen seconds later you will storm out, bearing a Valuable Life Lesson instead of that yellow pass to Hollywood.

And even if your Compassion reserves are at 100%, you might still want to do some deep knee bends or something to prepare. Here, I'll start off from 90 minutes ago and work my way backwards:

If not for the thoughtful intervention of my cabin steward, I would have completely missed my five-course dinner. He rapped on my door at 8:30 PM, waking me from an unplanned four-hour nap and leaving me with just fifteen minutes to insert some cufflinks into a shirt and change into my formalwear. I had planned on spending some time on my private balcony with an improving book, but dash it...it simply was not to be.

In fact, I was in such a rush to get to the restaurant that I didn't even change into my black silk socks, and strode to my table hoping that nobody would notice the grey hiking socks lurking underneath my pant leg.

I know! But wait, the story gets worse.

I was on a fabulous cruise ship, yes, but it was a full, full day of work. When a person offers to send me on an all-expenses cruise to Mexico, I naturally feel a certain amount of obligation to make good, so long as there's no close-dancing involved. Neil just wanted me to deliver a total of seven hours' worth of talks to the attendees of his Mac Mania cruise. A heavy workload for the week, but on the whole: can-do. But what he had in mind was that I'd do it all during our first full day at sea, with naught but a one-hour lunch break in between.

It will occur to many of you that this is not a small amount of time to spend speaking. Well-spotted: this occurred to me as well. Unfortunately, it didn't really occur to me until long after I'd emailed Neil to say sure, absolutely...I'd be happy to.

In the morning, it was three-and-a-half hours teaching an introductory course on the Mac. This is a tough, tough sort of lecture to give to a large group, because everyone in the room is on a different metaphorical floor. I had about 30-40 people, ranging from someone who only had basic cultural understanding of computers (ie, one day the machines shall become self-aware, arise as one, and enslave Humanity) to a seasoned IT guy who simply had never used a Mac before. It was definitely a challenge, but definitely a fun one. I used to give this class all the time way (way) back when (1) there was such a thing as The Boston Computer Society and (2) I was still a highly-active volunteer. And I think I delivered the goods. It was hard to know for sure, for reasons that will become plain soon enough.

The afternoon session was something I was calling "Macs for Dilletantes," a title that five months ago (when Neil asked for a title and description) translated to "I'm not really sure what I'll talk about, but I'll make it interesting and informative." As I developed my talks over the past month, this session evolved into three-and-a-half hours of Heavy Concepts and a very welcome antidote to a morning filled with detail-detail-detail. The goal was to introduce people to wide, basic concepts (Unix, networking, scripting, troubleshooting, etc.) and leave them fired up to get the whole Mac Experience in the coming weeks and months. Sure, they didn't leave knowing how to kill processes from the command line using remote login, but they got a little Terminal command-line magic show and they left knowing why Unix is the most important feature of Mac OS X that they never, ever, ever have to deal with.

The Killer Finish: Automator and AppleScript. And it was indeed a grand topic with which to end the session. First, I showed off my technique for building tactical heads-up navigational displays for the car (which went well as-is) and then transitioned into the next topic by building an Automator action to build one automatically, straight from the Print dialog, finishing off with a demo of this here blog app I'm using right now.

All in all, it was a two-PowerBook day of talks (Lilith 6 was along for the ride, so I could demonstrate networking) and as I packed up my gear, autographed a few books, and posed for some pictures, I was hoarse and tired but happily convinced that I hadn't wasted the folks' time.

Oh, yes: the "Hard to tell if I delivered the goods" bit. This brings us to the next hardship:

I had to give these presentations as the Great and Powerful Oz. This particular ship isn't really set up for Conference-style seating, which means that classes are being held in assorted unused lounges and theaters. I "owned" the Piano Bar for the whole day, for instance. But the layout of the room was such that when I arrived, I discovered that projection screens had been set up at opposite ends and I'd be seated in a little booth in the middle, out of direct view of the audience.

That's a pretty tough setup for a speaker. All performance is interactive, even a day's worth of lessons. As good as you think your material is, you'll only know for sure as you witness how it's playing on the crowd. One glance and you think "Okay, they get this; I'm going to cut the demonstration short and just move on" or "Dangit. Let's talk about this for another five or ten minutes, just to make absolutely sure they understand it."

Cut off from that sort of feedback, I chose to pause after each major section for comments and questions, to keep Audience and Speaker in sync with each other.

On balance, the extra difficulty was more than offset by the fact that I had a good microphone on a boom stand. The Piano Bar bears a holistic retro cheesiness, which is an admirable achievement given that the ship is only a few years old and with two PowerBooks in front of me -- I brought Lilith 6 so I could demonstrate networking -- it wasn't hard to imagine myself as a deejay at a moderately-successful Seventies dance club located in a busy Mid-Atlantic city.

("And now it's time to dust off your freak and hang it out to dry, 'cuz I got me a fifty-megaton boogie bomb here and the funk fuse is lit!Okay: enabling Windows File sharing is easier on the Mac side than on the PC side, but you're still going to have to enable it on a per-account basis. Get dowwwwwnnnn!")

And I desperately needed all of that symbolic 1970's cocaine and amphetamine-inspired energy, because

These seven hours of talks began at 8:30 AM.

It's well-established that I have many of the same weaknesses as Polaroid technology. Straight out of the camera, Andy Ihnatko is rather dull, lacking shading, and not very bright. I need some time for various natural and artificial chemicals to do their thing before you start to see any colors and focus and intensities in me.

On top of this,

The ship is traveling Southeast, and we crossed into a different time zone overnight.

Which means that clocks moved forward an hour, and in effect I had to start at 7:30, not 8:30. But I could have dealt with that. Unfortunately,

There was a small fire at 4:30.

Fire alarms sounded in every room, waking everybody up. As an avid watcher of the Discovery Channel, I knew that there was at least a slim chance of certain death, so when I heard the "It's probably nothing" announcement come over the PA, I put on pants and shoes and waited around until I heard the announcement "It was definitely nothing."

In the end, it turned out that there was a fire in the incinerator. Which to my ear, this sounded like good news. The incinerator was doing precisely what it was designed to do, and the crew all was on the same page together, apparently agreeing that it was foolish for them to go around setting fires in the casino (for example) when the perfect venue for conflagrations was right there in a lower deck waiting to be used. But then again, I'm no sailor. I suppose that they know best.

Part of what happened next was my fault, because

I couldn't get back to sleep.

"Big deal, so you only slept five hours," you say. You'd be right, except

I'd only managed to fall asleep about ten minutes before the fire alarm.

Yeah, y'see, now you understand my problem. Seven hours of talks on nine minutes of sleep. It's hard to know what to do with that sort of math except maybe to commit yourself to the belief that during those nine minutes, you dropped into some sort of subspace rift and moved at light speed for a brief moment, thus allowing you to sleep for eleven hours on your own clock while only seconds passed back on Earth.

That's definitely the sort of logic that appeals to you when you haven't slept, but it got me through the day all right.

But it was indeed a terrific Sunday. Dinner was great, we arrive in Cabo San Lucas in the morning, and after a brief ride in a much smaller vessel, I'll be snorkeling someplace pretty with a camera in my hand that lets light in while keeping water out.

And to cap things off, when I got back to my room after dinner, I found that the steward had left me a fresh beach towel, amusingly and cunningly tied into the shape of a monkey. On the whole, I have very little reason to complain.

Unless of course the next film after "Walk The Line" is "The Fantastic Four" again. Why does the cruise company tempt fate so, when they realize that I could pitch this TV into the Atlantic without even having to leave the comfort and luxury of my stateroom?

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I'd like to teach the world to sing.

Monday, February 6, 2006 4:04:53 PM

I. Love. Everybody.

You, there. I love you. You're absolutely wonderful in every way and the world would be a flimsier, cheaper place without you. And when I tell you that I've pretty much been telling this to everybody I've met since about 11:30 this morning and the occasional rock and signpost, don't feel as though I'm not 100% sincere in this sentiment.

Folks, I am in Mexico.

In Mexico, they don't refer to a Mexican Coke as a Mexican Coke. They just call it Coke...because -- I'm getting a little choked-up over what I'm writing -- Coca-Cola made with real cane sugar is EVERYWHERE.

Everywhere except the ship, which loaded in its supplies for the week back in San Diego. And they're, like $2 a can.

But today, I wasn't on the ship. I was on the boat. A big catamaran that took about 20 people out to a cove for snorkeling. There were snacks and drinks on board and a complimentary bottle was plucked from an ice chest and slapped into my hand and after one sip, one drop of this miracle tonic, I could see in color.

Okay, the snorkeling: quite fabulous. By design, I'm repeating the basic template for shore-excursions that I followed by accident on my previous Geek Cruise to Hawaii: I want a snorkel day, I want a beach day, and I want a day with absolutely no plans whatsoever except to wander around an unfamiliar place. Cabo sports terrific opportunities for paddling about and gawking at fish. My only complaint was that my previous (and only) snorkel was at Molokini Crater in Hawaii, which folks have later told me is one of the top ten places in the world for that sort of thing. As good as the experience is, and it was indeed terrific, it can't possibly measure up in the same way. It's like drinking a Coke sweetened with corn syrup after a week on the real Real Thing.

And I am now two-for-two on being the very last snorkeler to return to the boat; hooray to me, for getting the most value for money. Pity about my rented goggles, though. It turns out that they only looked they'd float if I dropped them in the water for convenience while taking off my fins.

So, one mission objective had been met. The boat dropped us off back at the port and I had five hours left before the last tender ride to the ship. A bit of random walking was in order. Pre-cruise intelligence-gathering had left me with the conclusion that the best way to get some spending cash for the excursions was to find a real, national bank sort of ATM in the first port and load up on pesos for the rest of the week. I had to walk a (rather pleasant) two miles before I found one, but now I'm a Peso Thousand-Aire and I expect that this $95 wad will last me on the next two incidents of turisme-especiale.

I started walking back to the tender dock. A Terminator-style digital display enhanced my vision because I was now focused on another Mission Objective: lay in a supply of Mexican Cokes for the whole rest of the week.

Behold, the spoils from a convenience store near the bank:

No, they're not the idealized green glass bottles, and yes, they're the "shorty"-style cans. But I choose to see both of these things as advantages. Glass-bottle Coke tastes (marginally) better, but it's a "specialty" product. People don't generally buy them, which means that they can stick around in the display case for an awfully long time. Cans have a quick sell-through so they're always fresh, and freshness trumps packaging every single time.

As for the short-loads, this gives me a decent chance of actually having some cans left over to take home, plus they fit better in my stateroom's minifridge.

I will also remind you that I am a weak man, and the half-size cans make it very likely (or perhaps just marginally possible) that I'll have plenty (or one) left over to take home. And with stuff this good, each sip is nearly as satisfying as a whole can of American Coke. I pilfered a 500ml bottle from the dive boat and as I write this, I am sipping it from a tall glass. I'm down to my last five ounces or so and I fear that being pleased on the sub-genetic level like this can't possibly be healthy.

Runners speak of the incredible high that they experience at around Mile Eleven of a marathon, when vast quantites of endorphins are dumped into their brain chemistry. I'm getting that same effect by sitting here on my balcony and gazing out at a rather gorgeous coastal rock formation, noodling on a computer. Runners, therefore, are all morons.

Nonetheless, I love them. They're absolutely wonderful in every way and the world would be a flimsier, cheaper place without them. I would do a little dance in honor of the runners and you and Mexican Coke and this ticket stub that I found in my pocket when I got back to my cabin and undressed, but I don't want to risk falling over the railing of the ship and landing on "Dateline: NBC".

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Exiled.

Sunday, February 12, 2006 1:25:28 PM

I am sitting in a lovely room at a resort in La Jolla, California, about twenty minutes away from San Diego. Palm trees lurk impatiently just outside my picture window. The pool opens in ten minutes and there seems to be some sort of putting green available. I didn't see it when I checked in last night, but it was dark, and how else to explain the sentence "Putters and Balls available at no charge at the Front Desk" in the Guest Services Guide? Golf equipment is used for two things and two things only: golfing, and colorful gangland retribution. I don't know whether or not there are so many loan sharks collecting bad debts out there that they're an identifiable and targettable demographic, but I'm aware that the hotel business isn't what it used to be and I applaud the management's eagerness to think outside the box.

It's a fine resort and La Jolla is a fine town to spend a couple of days in.

Prisoners have a tough time adjusting to life on the outside after years in stir, and it's no different for cruise-ship passengers. You have to get used to the weight of a wallet in your pocket again, and when walking through a restaurant or a food court, you must learn to resist the careless impulse to simply drop three times as much food as you can eat onto a tray and walk off without paying anything.

So spending a couple of transitional days in a hotel is a valuable Halfway House sort of experience. You're not expected to cook or clean or make your bed, but you still have a few responsibilities to take care of. For example, if I want to play Snowball Jackpot Bingo, I'll have to do some actual research and seek it out. Whereas back on the ship, all I had to do was be within earshot of the PA system, which provided helpful, around-the-clock reportage of Snowball Jackpot Bingo opportunities. These speakers were all over the ship and I think there were one or two underwater as well, just in case there was a diver plying the waters nearby who had a hydrophone and money.

As brilliant as this post-vacation halfway house concept is, I can't take credit. It was American Airlines' idea and I happily give them full credit. True, they didn't so much invite me to extend my vacation so much as they insisted that if they tried to land a plane in Boston during a full-on blizzard, lots of people would die horribly, but honestly, did Edison set out to invent the electric light bulb? Did Alexander Graham Bell plan to create the telephone?

Of course not. And here I prove that I'm better than both of these great men by admitting that I fell ass-backward into a brilliant idea.

Oh, well. What can you do in such circumstances but concede to Reality? Yes, I arrived at the airport with three checked bags, two carry-ons, and a plan to be home soon, but the death of the latter was so total, so "slaughter the men and boys, sell the women and daughters into slavery, pour salt on the land so that nothing can ever grow there again" that Looking on the Bright Side was really the only rational response.

Naturally, it's easy for a person who's single and self-employed to behave like a soft-focus Hallmark card photo in a situation like this. There are reasons why the passengers on the "Airline" reality show behave the way that they do, and it usually comes down to the fact that they've got children waiting for them at home and bosses-who-act-like-children waiting for them back at the office. For me, a two-day delay is just a petty annoyance at first (he said, sitting safely inside a resort hotel) and then an opportunity for some small bit of adventure and maybe some material for the blog.

No clue as to what I'm going to do with the extra time. I have a column due on Tuesday and I'll need to finish it, but the materials I need are back home and besides, the Internet access here in my hotel room isn't working. Did I even bother to pack a phone cord? I didn't bother to pack my cellphone charger, which is a far, far more obviously stupid thing to have done, so my hopes aren't high. I might have to find me a Radio Shack or something. If I'm extremely lucky, I'll be able to find a T-Mobile hotspot. But what are the odds that there's a Starbucks franchise in a major seaside town in California?

First: breakfast. Right after the Three Stooges is over with.

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Still in Elba

Monday, February 13, 2006 7:31:15 AM

Okey-doke...the in-room WiFi is back up, and it's a damned shame, too. When it comes to Internet access, I've been on MRE rations since I left Boston. The most expensive Internet access in the world is a system by which you write down the desired URL on vellum with a crow quill and then hand it off to a waiting uniformed page, who leaps onto a rippling Arabian horse and rides like the wind to a data center fifty miles away. Four days and three horses later, a carriage arrives back at your house and a company of seasoned and spritely minstrels performs the web pages' information for you in a series of skits and follies.

The second most-expensive way to access the Internet is to use the service onboard a cruise ship.

I bought the 250 minute package (a hundred clams) and had to buy an extra nine minutes (at seventy cents per) (make that seventy %#@&ing cents per) before disembarking. Thank heaven for NetNewsWire, which slurped down a day's worth of news and blog posts in record time every morning. I'm still way behind, but not as behind as I could be. That still left the problem of email. Every time I fired up my webclient it was like that scene in the movie when the Everyman Hero on the lam has to phone his wife, but he knows that the feds are tapping her phone and he has only thirty seconds before they complete the trace.

But the brilliant thing about No Internet is that it's like a snow day. I didn't really need a whole lot of encouragement to spend Wednesday walking around Puerto Vallarta instead of staying on the ship and fooling around with my PowerBook, but the Internet situation turned a No into a Hell, No. And the lack of WiFi-age here at my hotel in La Jolla urged me to keep my head out of the office for yet another day. Again a good thing, considering that I find myself exiled to a lovely resort-ey kind of town and it'd be a shame if I behaved as though I were in any hotel room anywhere else.

Yesterday's breakfast consisted of blueberry pancakes in one of the resort's two restaurants. It was followed by the securing of maps and the difficult process of formulating a plan for the day. I was sufficiently ignorant about La Jolla that I had it written down in the MessagePad as "La Hoya," after the boxer. I had maybe a half an hour to figure something out and the rest of my life to regret the impulsive choices I'd be making. "You were in La Jolla and you didn't see the Mona Lisa?" friends will ask, all agog. "The Louvre is just a $4 cab ride from anywhere in town!"

Damn. This is precisely the sort of problem that the Internet is good at. If I had me a pocketful of WiFi, I could have popped "la-jolla naked-animals" into Google and would soon find myself contemplating a short list of Good Times to be had. As it was, I noted the presence of a little icon of an anthropomorphic stick-figure in a walking pose there on the map. I decided to place my faith entirely in the work of an anonymous 1989 graphic designer: a seaside walk around Scripps Park it would be. My camera's battery and memory card had fully recovered after my Saturday afternoon assault on the San Diego Zoo and I was ready to do some more damage.

The walk is well-documented over at my Flickr blog. Any day in which you find yourself thinking "Okay, you know what? I think I'm just going to go ahead and take some pictures of that professional bikini model over there" is practically guaranteed a table at the big awards dinner at the end of the year.

All righty: AA.com claims that my 6 PM flight to LA is on schedule. I have breakfasted on half of the remaining half of the pizza I ordered for dinner last night. In weakness, I did indeed break out the Mexican Cokes that I'd packed in my luggage and it looks like I'll have just ten cans to take home with me instead of a dozen. I will take a long soak in the Jacuzzi, I will read my book, I will re-pack my suitcases, I will check out, and if it is God's will, I shall be on a plane speeding Eastward tonight.

I have been traveling for eleven days. I don't care if it snowed vampire zombie monkeys in Boston yesterday and the streets are full of the unholy ook-ook-ook-ing of the simian undead and the terrified cries of their human prey: I'm very, very ready to go home.

The USA Olympic Women's Curling team is ahead of Norway by a score of 6 to 4. I hope this is a good sign.

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Del Griffith - The Final Chapter

Monday, February 13, 2006 2:33:40 PM

I proudly summarize the events of my day thus far. I sit in the lobby of my hotel in La Jolla, awaiting a shuttle to San Diego airport and I assure you that I am garlanded with success:

1) I successfully secured a one-day extension on my column deadline. There was much sympathy offered for my travel distress; clearly, my editor didn't check my Flickr blog and see the photo of the bikini babe.

2) I committed myself to the goal of spending at least an hour in the whirlpool next to the pool; consider a "Mission Accomplished" banner duly hung on that fence next to the putting green;

3) Finished reading "Father Joe" by Tony Hendra. I've been carrying this paperback with me just about everywhere since I bought it in December, trying and failing to find time to get past Page 80. Done and dusted.

4) Re-packed my luggage, magically converting three checked bags to two, which seemed like a significant goal in that I'm only allowed two and I'm too old to try to play the "But I can't count that high" card;

5) Loaded up my PowerBook with news, blogs, podcasts, and other ephemera to last me until my next sip at the WiFi stream;

6) Lunched on a club sandwich. There's a strip mall and a shopping plaza up the hill from the hotel and two restaurants down the hill. I walked down, choosing to confront the issue of walking uphill at a later and unspecified date and time. One of these restaurants was an El Torito, but I looked at the big red letters spelling out "MEXICAN FOOD" and I just couldn't thrust such dishonor on all of the wonderful meals I had in Mexico last week;

7) Stocked the backpack with a liter of water and a king-size Mounds bar to sustain me through the long exodus back to Boston.

All in all, this has been one of those days that underscores why I continue to be such a sterling role model for America's youth.

This flight could be a rough one. Shuttle service runs on the hour, and I had to choose between leaving so early that I'd be stuck waiting at the airport for more than 90 minutes before boarding, or leaving at the perfect time and risking a dust-up with early commuter traffic.

I remind you that I have been on this trip for just shy of two weeks now. I can't get myself to that airport fast enough.

A commuter hop to LA will be followed by a two-hour wait for a flight to Boston. As of fifteen minutes ago, that flight was still on the schedule and on-time. Fingers crossed, there. If I suffer another cancellation I might -- might -- start weeping. Fortunately, it'll happen in LA where men who do that sort of thing tend to get along famously.

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One-Sixth Of Rome Wasn't Built In Four Hours

Monday, February 13, 2006 • 09:06:19 PM PST

Four hours in LAX.

I've been thinking those four words for the past 50 minutes or so and now that I'm actually looking at them...the concept seems even sillier.

Four hours. Four. Hours.

I got to the commuter terminal at San Diego International and was invited to board my flight to LA two hours early. So I've consolidated two long waits into a single Very Long one.

The jury's out on which of the two is easier to get through.

Crap. I just realized that my TiVO has probably already started deleting some of the shows it recorded for me last week. Normally, one of the last things I do before leaving on a long trip is to go through the "To Do" list and tell this lovely device to hold on to certain extra-special shows until at least a couple of days after I return. I'm guessing that I chose Monday as the drop-dead date. I shall add this to my list of Travel Mistakes I Don't Intend To Repeat. I've been working on it with great care and passion ever since my flight got cancelled two days ago.

There is a woman two seats away who's eating something and making noises that sound uncannily like a heavyset man walking through knee-deep mud wearing rubber boots.

06:17:13 PM
The woman is annoying me so much with the noise that I have AppleScripted a new feature for my blogger which allows me to datestamp a series of comments within a single post.

06:17:44 PM
Hey, cool...it works and everything.

06:19:37 PM
Now there's this other guy fifteen feet to my right who's asleep and loudly snoring. When did the glamor of air travel morph into the scabs-and-smells circle of Hell where Greyhound buses normally run?

06:26:11 PM
Have decided that the timestamp text is too big. And now there's a guy fiddling with the plastic top of his cup of soda. Crnk-crk...crnk-crnk-crnk...crk...crnk..crrrrrrkkkkkkkkkkk...

06:27:24 PM
I mean, seriously. It's as though this woman had an extra nine square inches of wet flesh sewn inside her cheeks just to boost the performance of her slurping and smacking to Tyrolean levels. If this were an Olympic event I'd order an immediate blood test because this sort of performance can only be the result of doping.

06:39:36 PM
Lip-smacker dropped an envelope behind her seat while chatting on phone. Didn't seem to notice. Called her attention to it on the floor and she thanked me very sweetly. Damn. Can no longer harbor an irrational dislike, now that I can relate to her as a human being instead of a cartoon. What fun is that?

07:06:39 PM
I don't like that leading zero in the datestring. Am using a shell command to generate it...is there a modifier that tells it "Don't insert a leading zero"? Am working my way through every possible command-line modifier to find out.

07:08:49 PM
I got as far as "%e" before muttering "Nuts to this." Am writing a bit of AppleScript to generate the table for me instead.

07:16:06 PM
Hey, cool...it works and everything. I ought to put the results in this posting so you can see it.

07:48:16 PM
Time needed to modify this thing so that it generates a HTML table instead of plain text: not long. Time needed to tweak the HTML table so it looks halfway decent: very very long.

So if you don't know what I've been talking about, go to the Terminal app and type "man date" for instructions on how to use the "date" command, or just "date" to see what it does. Here are all of the things that it can spit out:

07:52:35 PM
And after all of that, I see that "date" doesn't have a "don't insert a leading zero" operator. Damn and blast. I do notice that it has a time-zone generator. Cool. I must add that to the blogger's datestamp handler. I travel muchly and muchly blog while I travel, and it'd be more than a little nifty to have this tidbit appear someplace subtle. It was only recently that I finally gave CWOBber any awareness of time zones at all; the RSS generator was hardwired for Eastern Standard Time, meaning that the dates in the RSS feed never matched the dates in the actual blog. Progress is progress.

08:06:03 PM
Have added that to the blogger's datestamp handler. Troublingly, my intent was to eliminate those leading zeroes from this one new blogger feature and now here I've gone and introduced it to the datestamp handler that is called every single time a new post is created. But on the plus side, the datestamp now includes the current time zone as well as a little bullet that separates the date and time.

08:08:59 PM
I should also mention that I'm a colossal dumbass. In examining my new, handy-dandy AppleScript-generated documentation for the "date" shell command, I see that there's a way to pop out the offset from GMT automatically. I need this data for the blog item's RSS entry, and until ten minutes ago the blogger had to generate it on its own by making a calculation and then text-bashing the string together. That's the glory and the heartache of writing software. There's always something out there that can reduce twenty lines of code into twenty characters and finding that Something is usually a matter to dumb luck. I wouldn't have found "%z" if I hadn't written an AppleScript to try every letter from A-Z and a-z. Oh well; I have it now.

08:18:53 PM
Have been so engrossed in AppleScript and shell commands that I didn't even notice that the terminal has emptied around me. A nice gentleman in a Sun Microsystems golf shirt has just taken a nearby seat and the wall plug just underneath mine. My how the time flies when you're coding. I wonder if my ukulele, hat, backpack, and jacket were stolen while I was zoned out?

08:19:07 PM
Nope, they're right here.

08:29:31 PM
Boarding is now within sight: it'll begin in just over a half an hour. Too late to get some dinner, but then again the only places in this terminal are fast-food and Chilis. I should mention that the Chilis people have committed double-sins of grammar and typography on the sign marking their "To Go" window. One, they have chosen to call it the "Too Go" window (do they handle a lot of mercury there in the front office, perchance?). Secondly, they have mushed the letters together and used haphazard letter sizes. Their punishment: forevermore, thousands of daily passengers will read it as the "Chili Stoogo" window. And may God have mercy on Chilis soul.

09:05:50 PM
Two surprises as I yawned and stood and stretched. I looked at the status board for the first time cince I sat down forty hours ago and noted that the gate has changed. Oops. I packed up, thoughtfully communicated this news to my fellow Bostonians in nearby seats, and arrived at 47A to discover that they'd begun the boarding early. A good sign.

I am now in my seat and God willing, I will be home in six hours. Push the button, Frank...

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Get Back To Where You Once Belonged

Tuesday, February 14, 2006 • 02:01:02 PM EST

Back home. Not only am I back home, but I'm back home and I've had a five-hour nap, which is about as Back Home as you can get.

And what a thrill is was to take my first steps out of the airport and fill my lungs with that crisp, New England air. Indeed I did immediately start coughing so violently that I threw up just a little. But that's only natural. I've been breathing nothing but 75-degree West Coast beach air for the past 11 days and a period of adjustment is to be expected.

Am slightly disappointed to find that the region is hardly paralyzed by the icy grip of a record-breaking blizzard. At home, we got what could be termed A Good Snowfall but nothing to inspire round-the-clock coverage on CNN. During the shuttle ride from the airport, the sight through the window was so not-unusual that I wondered if maybe this Terrible Blizzard had screwed up the live view and the city was forced to run stock footage in its place.

But who cares? It's terrific to be home. Don't ask why. I have swapped a hotel in a resort community for a house where I desperately need to do laundry and there's an enormous pile of mail and packages to sort through and I need to get right on the stick to catch up with work and I don't even want to think about how long it'll take to download eleven days' worth of emails (while on the road, I've sent quick replies to anything that needed immediate attention, but that's it).

No more travel for nearly two months. Praise the usual gang of praisees.

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To Sleep, Perchance to Steal

Wednesday, February 15, 2006 • 10:02:13 AM EST

Yeah, I know: "9:30 AM? And Ihnatko is actually awake?" Indeed, it's a world gone mad, but such is the inevitable outcome of a redeye flight. Many folks complain that sleeping on an airplane isn't really sleeping, but that only swats at the truth. After you land, you need to get 90 minutes of real sleep for every hour that you napped on the plane. I dozed from 10 AM to mid-day yesterday and then I fell asleep at around 10 PM last night, waking up again at 5:20 AM this morning. I think I'm finally back on the plus side of the ledger, sleep-wise.

The process of unpacking continues. I've managed to excavate the rollaway down to the Treasures from Mexico layer and was thrilled to find that none of my 11 remaining Mexican Cokes burst, exploded, sprung a leak, or otherwise marinated my laundry in caramel coloring and phosphoric acid, and a small collection of (very pretty) pottery left the bag in no more pieces than they had when they went in.

Including a small item which I might, underscore might, have shoplifted.

There's a certain thing that I try to acquire during every single overnight trip I take. I won't say what it is (I'm not entirely convinced that it's an interesting story) but suffice to say that I have trays and trays of them by now. I never know where I'll find it or how, but there it was in that little shop in Puerto Vallarta. I knew It Would Be Mine.

But they had lots of other cool stuff too, and before long I had a half-dozen bits of assorted inventory collected there on the floor. The shopkeeper haunched down over my little cache with me and we talked turkey. I got a great price, I think. He started off in dollars; I asked for pesos, and immediately won a 10% advantage. By the time we finished, we had arrived at a little more than half the starting price.

"Tres ciento." I finally countered. "¿Tres ciento, para todo, si?"

He checked with another guy and the deal was done: three hundred, for everything.

The Certain Item was in my hand and I didn't have him wrap it in newspaper with all the rest; too easy to lose it in there, I thought. I slipped it into my shirt pocket, took my change, and after (regrettably) deciding not to buy that really cool black ceramic skull, I made my exit.

It wasn't until five minutes later that I wondered if he'd even seen the Certain Item in my hand. I wasn't concealing it, mind you, but I didn't set it on the floor with the rest of the stuff and I never did a big point-and-flourish, either. The item was about the size of half a lime and it could easily have been overlooked in my big, beefy, he-manly, Make Olive Oyl Swoon-sized hands.

When I said "Para todo," he understood that I meant everything on the floor and that other item, didn't he?

Umm...

No, I didn't go back to clear things up. It wasn't exactly a diamond earring. It was more sort of thing that they'd keep behind the counter after putting an ad in a cruise magazine reading "Show us your Holland America ID card for a free gift!" Besides, I'm not sure if my Spanish was up to the challenge. I'm not completely certain that my English would have been up to it, either. Haven't you ever been in a store trying to make a clerk, and then a department manager, and then the store manager understand that they've accidentally given you a free $30 sweater and you'd like them to please charge you for it?

High-school Spanish is almost less convenient than no Spanish at all. I found that I could indeed say what I needed to say, but only if I had a moment to write it out in my head. There was this fantastic hand-painted Coca-Cola billboard on the side of a building near a beach. I simply had to have my picture taken standing in front of it, but I didn't know any of the Americans there. So I asked a waiter "¿Por favor, puedes ayudame con un foto?" -- Please, could you help me with a photo? It worked; he followed me to the sign. But I couldn't remember the word for "stand" so I merely scratched an X in the sand and said "Aqui, por favor. Y..."

And here I realized I had no idea how to say "Please fit the entire sign into the picture, from side to side" so I mimed the whole width with my hands and asked "Quiero el 'Coca-Cola' en todo, por favor." "En todo" means "In everything" but it got the job done. And as in all languages and countries -- even America -- when you're speaking with a member of the service industry, a gratuity smooths over any unintentional offenses you may have committed with the local language.

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This Is Mic Number One, This Is Mic Number One...

Friday, February 17, 2006 • 03:12:35 AM EST

Once again I give you a thrilling post filled with light and life and wonder and laughter and insight and none of those things, actually, because all I'm doing is testing some blogger code.

Push the button, frank...

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The Eagle has Landed

Friday, February 17, 2006 • 04:15:33 AM EST

Cool. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time since the summer, I have a working blogger app. Not a batch of scripts that have to be managed manually, not something that creates files that I then have to FTP myself...but an item in a menu that takes the contents of an editing window and turns it into two live webpages and an updated live XML file.

The FTP access was the last piece of the puzzle. Actually, it sort of still is. I was hoping to upgrade the app's transfer abilities to allow for secure FTP, but for no matter how many chickens I sacrifice to Hr'HraAAl, I can't make the sftp shell command do what I want it to do. But the good news is that I've got a lead on some stray dogs that nobody's gonna miss, so I'm expecting a breakthrough any day now.

Remember, of course, that the only reason why all of this was even necessary was because the latest rev of CWOBber was the only major thing that I hadn't backed up before Lilith's hard drive went 100% failure. Bad Andy. But I didn't reuse even one line of the old code...it's been rewritten from the ground up, and benefits from the fact that I'm significantly less dumb now than I was five years ago, which is how old some of the original code was.

Good boy, Andy. In fact, it runs so quickly that during its first live-fire exercise a few weeks ago, I cursed and clicked back into the script editor to find out why it had terminated early. But nope, the operation that used to take a few seconds now took just a few moments. Excellent.

There are a few new features and only one major downgrade: it's not an application. It's just a collection of scripts. But that's because the original XCode app was just a GUI to the scripts. This time, I wanna make this a formal document-based application with logging and data sources. Status: I'm just one-for-three on grokking those concepts. I was hoping that I could bamboozle Sal Saghoian -- Apple's own Iron Chef of scripting -- into walking me through it during the cruise last week, but unfortunately, I'm not a bastard and thus I preferred to allow the man to spend his free time enjoying the ship and his family.

Well, that ought to go smoothly enough. Because in addition to the speed boost, the rewrite has left me with a bunch of nice, modular handlers that will drop into XCode much more cleanly than the old code did.

All the same, I think it'll be a while before I move to XCode with this. There are too many other little creature-comforts that I'd like to add, first. Even when CWOBber was a standalone, there were plenty of things that I had to do by hand, like editing the info in the sidebar, there. I still haven't removed the MacMania cruise info and replaced it with a newer speaking thing yet because there's a certain amount of hassle involved. Why should I have to sully my hands with that in the first place? It'd be so much simpler to just create a new calendar in iCal, and tell CWOBber how to freshen the sidebar with the most current two items therein every time I make a new posting, yes?

On and on. And to think that a few months ago I was actually considering moving Yellowtext to a "real" blogging app. TypePad does ten times as much as CWOBber...but posting things to my blog is only half the fun.

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$338,000,000 Can Buy MANY Donuts

Friday, February 17, 2006 • 03:31:07 PM EST

This morning I made an hourlong roundtrip to Rhode Island just to buy a few PowerBall tickets. I bought them at the first lottery store across the Massachusetts border, the type of liquor store that seems to cater mostly to the "I just got released from a court-ordered rehab an hour ago and I told the cabbie to drop me off right here" demographic.

But I'm definitely not a loser. No, no, no. My policy is to only buy lottery tickets when the payoff is so high that you can credibly express it in terms of a fraction of a billion dollars. Maybe not even then. Powerball stood at a quarter-billion at the last draw and yet I remained unmoved. But now it's up to a third of a billion clams. The return on my $5 investment is now high enough to offset the risk to my capital. I ran the numbers and everything; spreadsheets don't lie.

No, I am indeed a Winner. Because soon after I spun my car around on Route 1 for the trip back home, I found myself passing a donut place. The name escapes me but it appeared to be

...Judging from the three-foot-high letters on the roof. Together, this place and the seedy liquor store had the Lottery Refugee market all sewn up. The first store catered to Massachusetts residents traveling to buy Powerball tickets. DONUTS LOTTERY, on the other side of the state line, nammed the Rhode Islanders seeking to buy into the Big Win or Big Game or whatever the other multi-state thingamabob is.

I liked the name of the establishment (just what, precisely, is a "Starbuck"?) and I felt an immediate urge to register my support for that decision with my consumer dollars. It's honest. If you swung into the parking lot of a place called "Mom's Olde-Fashioned Familye-Styile Breakfast Bakery Shoppe" and walked in to find that the interior had been decorated entirely in a scratch-off dispenser sort of motif, you'd feel a bit hoodwinked. But when you walk into DONUTS LOTTERY, you nod with a certain amount of satisfaction.

And after many long months of withdrawal, I was truly in the mood for a proper cruller. Dunkin' Donuts had long-since succombed to pressure from Canadian religious groups and deleted this eminently practical and sensible item from its menu. And as for Krispy Kreme...forget it. A cruller (or, really, any donut that can be eaten while driving or wearing work gloves) is way too lowbrow a product for the Kreme.

Yes, if donuts were swimming pools, Krispy Kreme would be building one of those foofy things with a natural-looking cliff formation and a far-off edge that seems to meld into the horizon. You know, the sort of pool that seems to have been designed specifically for shooting a perfume ad around, and which only gets used when a platform is built above it so that the guests at Oprah's 55th birthday party can dance.

A Dunkin' Donut is a sensible, affordable in-ground pool that always has at least two of the owner's kids and three of the neighbors' in it, and whose most promiment accessory is an amusing sign that begins "Welcome to our Ool. Notice that there is no 'P' in it..."

The donuts at DONUTS LOTTERY are a 4" above-ground pool purchased from a friend of a friend, with steps leading up to it made from cinderblocks that were scrounged from the rest of the property. Humble, but proud.

So I bought two crullers, which made me a Winner. But then I bought a single Quick-Pick for the Massachusetts lottery (remember: diversification is the tentpole of any sensible long-range investment strategy), negating the positive net impact of the crullers.

Fortunately, there was a machine outside that dispensed a "Homies" figurine for fifty cents, putting me firmly back in the "Win" column. So anybody who claims that I just threw away six dollars on two slips of worthless paper with numbers on them doesn't know what he's talking about.

And if either one of these tickets come in, well, that'll shut you up quick. If it doesn't, my eerily-lifelike new Bruce Lee android will, just eight nanoseconds after I push a little blue button on my wristwatch.

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Boinnnngggggg! That's GOTTA Hurt!

Saturday, February 18, 2006 • 07:15:13 AM EST

I agree: the Olympics is a wonderful and all-too-rare example of the peoples of the world uniting for a common, positive endeavor. In the past 100 years it seems like we've only been able to do that when the goals were to either determin an international champion in the field of curling, or to beating back the seemingly-unstoppable Nazi war machine. It's a bummer that this whole "redistribute wealth and resources to eliminate needless suffering" thing has been back-burnered but let's not begrudge the world community its many successes.

But from my point of view, the best thing about the Olympics is the simple fact that for one brief, shining moment, there's actually something decent on TV after 2 AM. I mean, thank God. When you have (a) a tendency to work through the wee hours and (b) no cable in the office, you find yourself watching the Magic Bullet Food Preparer infomercial over and over again and scrutinizing it with an ever-more-careful eye. "What is the backstory of each of these characters?" I ask myself. "Why is the middle-aged lady there all alone? Everybody else is a couple, even those two gay guys off on their first weekend. Is that why she chain-smokes? Has she realized that the clock is ticking and she's uneasily circling the realization that she's destined to ride this great gondola of life alone?"

Mostly I'm wondering what the TripAdvisor.com review of this bed & breakfast looks like.

"On the plus side, you can expect your included meals to be ambitious in scope, scale, and ingredients, ranging from typical breakfast fare such as omelettes, muffins, and fresh mixed-fruit smoothies to brunch and lunch specialties like quesadillas and chicken salad. On the minus side, the proprietors Mick and Mimi just can't stop blathering on and on and on about the weird little palm-sized blender that they prepare all of the food with. Their obsessive ethusiasm for this gadget is odd, considering that its single-serving capacity requires that each guest's portion has to be prepared one at a time. Surely a more conventional appliance -- or even just a decent chopping knife -- would be a faster solution. Or perhaps their odd behavior isn't so odd after all, given that it's 8 AM and yet they're already mixing up daquiris, margaritas, and other blended alcoholic drinks. This, and their overall bizarre demeanor, makes one suspect that what they're preparing is not so much a breakfast as a nightcap."

But I've got a two-week reprieve from the Bullet Blender people and the Creepy John Waters-Looking Colonic Cleansing Guy and That Guy Who Keeps Selling His Herbal Health Book Even Though "Dateline: NBC" Totally Fried Him On Network TV. Tonight, it was ice-dancing and women's snowboardcross. Ice-dancing is the most bizarre of all of the figure-skating events in the sense that the competitors don't seem to spend any time sliding around on the butts or faces. After all of the coverage of freestyle figure skating it's all very jarring, off-putting and even just a little bit vulgar. Did the ice-dancers not read all the memos in the info packet? Flawless execution and careful attention to the minutest details are soooo Lake Placid 1980. Modern skating is all about attempting impossible stunts in a half-assed way. It's more inviting; it makes everyone watching at home with a bowl of buttered Cheetos in their lap think "Hey, maybe I could do this."

Well, hopefully they'll get with the program and join their figure-skating brothers and sisters in exhibiting all of the grace and dignity on the ice that you'd expect from Bruce Vilanch.

Once again I'd like to make a sensible and brilliant proposal. If you're a figure-skater and you're filling your program with lots of fancy tricks that you may or may not be able to actually pull off, go right ahead. But under my regime, you would do so with the understanding that if you fall on your ass, the guy in the sound booth will be dubbing in a slide whistle or tires squealing, followed by the sound of a cymbal crash, glass breaking, or an extended comic Boinggggg!. It would go out live to their community's largest single world audience. The sound effects would go right into the master tape, too, so it'd be on every replay in perpetuity.

After the third fall, a siren would sound and a clown blowing a whistle would skate on the ice with an enormous broom, angrily and frenetically chasing the skaters and swatting them off, just like on "Showtime At The Apollo."

It'll play well on TV, the kids will love it, it might encourage these skaters to work a little harder at their craft...I simply can't find a single hole in this idea.

The other big sport of the night was the finals of the Women's Snowboardcross. I love this event: a half-dozen racers start at the top of the hill and then somewhat fewer than a half-dozen cross the finish line at the bottom. First one there wins. Simple and satisfying. All this "racing the clock" crap is nuts. Where's the excitement in a series of runs in which individual skiiers try to shave slivers off of the .18 second lead established by the Austrian guy? Especially when the only thing that the commentators have to say is that this lead possibly can't hold up, because this next guy has that new sort of helmet with the special enhanced laminar-flow paint, and he drank a special mid-alkaline solution the night before to ensure that his bladder would lower his center of gravity and enhance his lateral stability. Too many of these events are (by all appearances) all about the tech and the training, and the athlete's determination and ability to rise to the occasion are nothing more than tools to make sure that the hardware does its job.

There's none of this in the snowboarding events. Maybe the sport's simply too new to have had all of the excitement streamlined out of it. Even in the speed events, the athletes don't seem to be wearing anything particularly aerodynamic. I'm not even absolutely certain that they all them bother to take off their iPod earbuds before they leap out of the gate.

The sad news from the Snowboardcross was the conclusion of the medal run. It wasn't so much that Lindsey Jacobellis took a spill on the second-to-last hill, just when it looked like she had a gold medal in the bag, as heartbreaking as that must have been for her. It was that the commentators simply wouldn't stop harping on the reasons why it happened. "Showboating," "horsing around"...I even heard the phrase "One of the greatest gaffes in sports history," which seemed to be laying it on a little bit thick given that (a) all she really did was kick out the back end of her board a bit at the height of the jump, and (b) videotape of Bill Buckner's handling of that little ground ball in the 1986 World Series still exists.

Snowboardcross isn't a "style" event and the only goal is to cross the finish line first. So noted. But come on; it wasn't like she tried to drop her pants in mid-air and moon the parents of the person in second place. The kick-out almost seemed like a reflex action, an extention of her excitement as opposed to a real desire to show off.

Jacobellis was a real good sport about it, turning up for studio interview with Bob Costas. She seemed to have the right attitude...a little self-reproachful for having taken a spill that cost her the gold, but still thrilled to have won a silver medal in the freakin' Olympic Games, after all. I'll be doubly-impressed with her if she can maintain this demeanor over the rest of the weekend, when surely she won't receive a moment's peace from the press and thousands of armchair snowboarders.

And the results could have been far worse. Of the four competitors in the medal run, only one made it to the finish line without a spill. The Bronze finisher had to pick up her board and trot to the top of the next hill to resume her run and collect her medal. The remaining competitor eventually came down on an orange emergency gurney sled.

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Nobody EVER says 'Ftumsch.'

Sunday, February 19, 2006 • 01:11:31 AM EST

A few bits and pieces:

1) Tonight, I purchased and consumed the first Cadbury Caramel Egg of the Easter season. I am allowed to have two more of these seasonal delights before the product disappears from store shelves for another 11 months. It's very, very important that I set a limit of three because otherwise I'd do something manifestly sensible, IE have an egg-sized glob of chocolate and caramel for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day for the duration.

2) If you're making use of this blog's RSS feed and are experiencing any degree of wonkiness, please let me know. I completely rewrote the RSS component of my blogger a few weeks ago and in the process, I fixed a number of longstanding problems. The good news is that the feed now validates as 100% compliant with the RSS 2.0 spec. The bad news is that I've received a couple of emails from NetNewsWire and Bloglines users whose Yellowtext subscriptions have been dented and dinged.

3) I've been thinking about the way that my blogger app stores its data and wondering if I can come up with something better. After lots of research and thought, I have come to the conclusion that I'm truly not even half as clever as I think I am, and therefore I've abandoned even the pretense that I'm going to switch it over to an SQL database or a Cocoa data source or somesuch.

CWOBber has been manipulating HTML text files since the day it first went live. The app loads these in, looks for a tag that says in effect "New content goes HERE," does the right and honorable thing, and then writes the updated file back to disk and FTPs it onto the webserver. Nobody gets hurt, and really, there's no need to get the cops or the insurance companies involved, wouldn't you agree?

But this scheme sucks -- mildly, I stress -- on a couple of levels. For instance, I'd love to be able to re-open an existing post and make some fixes, but by the time the new content goes "live" it's been dropped into the stew pot with the all of the previous posts, and at that point the only way to apply a Photoshop "De-Bonehead" filter to my wordage is to edit the HTML manually. And if it's the most recent item, I have to edit it twice. If the mistake is in the first paragraph...three times.

When a post contains lines like "determin an international champion in the field of curling, or to beating back the seemingly-unstoppable Nazi war machine," these typos and editing mistakes tend to stick there for a while. Now you know why: I can't really fix them until I can get a good nap, a shower, and a nourishing meal.

So I was thinking that if I stashed all of this content into an SQL database, then hell...I'd have a fully-scalable enterprise solution with content that could be deployed as a vertical distribution to several vectors and clients simultaneously, in both Push- and Pull-configurations.

And here you see the problem with SQL. All I really want to do is tell thousands of people that I've just eaten a Cadbury Caramel Egg and to be honest, I wouldn't know a fully-scalable enterprise solution if its parachute failed to open and its body splattered onto my patio right in the middle of my Memorial Day barbecue. I don't even know if I'm zoned to Deploy things Vertically, either; this is a residential neighborhood, after all.

As for data sources...I've been reading up on 'em and trying several different example projects with them and they seem to be amazingly powerful and flexible. But like almost everything with AppleScript and AppleScript Studio, the documentation is ambitiously vague and powerfully misleading. Data sources are either (a) just a way to populate a table or outline element in a window, or (b) a data storage and retrieval infrastructure that Jesus Christ Himself would have used, if He hadn't had His hands full with all the fishing and the carpentry and the Redeeming and whatnot.

This afternoon, I finally gave up and tried the same basic technique I've been using since school, in a dozen different languages and environments: just create a single data structure that could contain all of my content (in this case, a simple list of records). Read it straight from disk into a container and parse it in memory. Write it back to disk as needed. You wouldn't want to use this technique if the data in question were raw, realtime LANDSAT telemetry, but it ought to work just fine for my little blog.

Maybe this isn't the best way to go about it, but I'm already in Deep Thought mode: my circuits have completely and irrevocably committed to this new task and it's simpler to just go ahead and do it this way than to think of something better. It's already reaping rewards, anyway: I'm at that exciting point in any programming project -- any of mine, anyway -- in which I'm forced to actually print out all of my code thus far, take pen in hand, and literally sketch out where I go from here.

Putting all of the blog's data into a formal structure means that the blogger data will no longer "live" on my hard disk as HTML files. HTML documents are just the files that the app will "burn" as output at the very, very end of the blogging process. And this has plenty of keen implications. If the index.html file and the monthly archive file are born anew with each new post...well, why not make them more lively?

Suffice to say that the whiteboard is out and many dopey, half-baked ideas are being hashed out. The good news there is that the special whiteboard marker is loaded with acetone-like chemicals and the longer I jot out notes and diagrams and inhale those fumes, the greater the population of elves, police ducks, and talking floorboards that will join me here in the office. And by delegating a lot of the app's development to these fantastical creatures, I ought to get this update ready to ship in weeks instead of months.

Scoff if you must, but there's a reason why iWeb works the way it does, and why it was completed as quickly as it was.

4) I've finally gotten around to "claiming" Yellowtext in Technorati, and in the process I saw a list of blogs that have linked to my posts. I was greatly amused to spot a blog by someone calling himself "Ftumsch." "Ftumsch" is a profoundly obscure reference and identifying it at once is a deeply satisfying experience.

5) New Flickr album: the San Diego Zoo.

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Suffer A Little, Save A Lot

Monday, February 20, 2006 • 06:38:43 AM EST

I'm issuing a Building #19 Alert to all New England operatives. I stopped in one of these extremely fine salvage stores yesterday and I wish to report two recent deliveries of particular interest to geeks:

1) "I hate businesswear but sometimes they make me"-style blazers. At the moment, I'm in my usual work clothes: cargo shorts and a tee shirt. If it's one of those days when the CEO is visiting the office, I might throw on a pair of socks just to make my department manager look good, but usually this is it.

But I do have to venture out into the Big Room occasionally (the one with the tacky blue ceiling and that big-ass overhead light fixture) and sometimes when that happens I also need to make a decent impression. So the sad truth is that I'm of that age where if I want Society to give me credit for trying, I need to keep a jacket or two in the closet. Still, I have rules. First, that a suit should cost less than a hundred dollars. Even if it costs me a full Benjamin, I insist that it should deliver extra value by being reversible; ideally, a sedate black or navy that can turn inside-out and become a James Brown-style leopard-print number for a late night of clubbing after the funeral.

And secondly, I need pockets. Pockets, pockets, pockets. I've got a phone and a PDA and maybe a foldable bluetooth keyboard. When I fly, I need to keep my tickets and passport within reach. I've got an iPod, and headphones. Maybe a paperback. Oh, and I like Pringles, too. I insist on a business jacket with at least one pocket that's big and deep enough for a can of Pringles. And a soda. Those chips make you sort of salty.

Needless to say, bringing the menswear industry around to my way of thinking has been a struggle. But Oscar De La Renta has signed on board, and they've done so well with this product that a massive pile of unsold inventory arrived at Building #19 this week. As a jacket, it's 100% wool and un-fussy. As geekwear, there isn't a single interior surface that isn't embellished with some sort of pocket. And while it isn't reversible, it's got the next-best thing: a secret pocket. Just the place to hide your X-Ray Specs.

$180 from a catalogue, $70 from Building #19. There you go: that's what a business jacket should cost. This garment receives the hearty Ihnatko Seal of Unreserved Endorsement.

2) HP LaserJet printers. Apparently, some sort of office store recently went out of business. Amongst the build-it-yourself computer desks and bric-a-brac I found three or four workgroup-grade HP DeskJets. I didn't think to jot down the model number but they're high-volume, 1200 DPI and fully networkable; the sticker said that they were $900 retail but I think these things usually sell for about $800 on the Internet.

Unopened, factory-fresh cartons were selling there for $450. Worth a look if you're in the market for something more substantial than a personal laser printer.

Oh, and incidentally, a follow-up: the same steward who Left A Beach Towel In My Stateroom Cunningly And Amusingly Crafted Into The Shape Of A Monkey during my cruise did the same for my pal Jason in the cabin next door. Photographic evidence is now online.

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The Office

Thursday, February 23, 2006 • 02:38:10 PM EST

Okay, y'see, now this is why I don't have cable TV here in my office. A couple of weeks ago I hooked up a Slingbox to my TiVO and installed the SlingPlayer app on one of my Windows notebooks. As I write this, here in my Fortress of Productivity, aka Where The Magic Happens -- last year, the chamber of commerce erected a tasteful redwood sign outside the highway exit to aid tourists, pilgrims, and process servers -- my attention is split between this editing window and SlingPlayer, which is showing the "Project Runway" reunion show that I TiVO'ed last night.

I'm not supposed to be able to watch TiVO in here. The whole system is breaking down.

And it was such a wonderful system. I would burn shows to DVD ("Runway" is burning right now) and watched them later on in the office while reading news and mail. I was free from the imperative of "Well, if I don't watch it now, it might get deleted off the hard drive." It was impossible to think "I realize that this column is due in a couple of hours, but why don't I just see what's on CSPAN-2 first?" and then follow that up with three hours of time-wasting inaction.

The problem is that the Slingbox works so damned well. I'm accessing it wirelessly and the full-screen video is practically perfect. This is a low-powered old Dell but even so, it's hard to tell the difference between a show streaming "live" through the Slingbox and a show that's being played locally from a burned DVD.

Clearly, I need to get as much work done as I possibly can before the Mac client ships sometime in the next few months.

This is shaping up to be a rather intense office day and I'm firmly in "CEO of IhnatCorp" mode, which is the crunchy-wheat opposite of my sugar-frosted "Sensitive Artiste" side. The contract for the next book has been worked out, the contract for the book after that has already been executed, and it's also time to start laying the groundwork for a book or two that I'd like to write in 2007. They would be sold in a different section of Barnes & Noble entirely, so it's not the sort of thing I can sell by just thinking "Hey, you know who might be interested in publishing this? Kenny. I should definitely give Kenny a call."

Phone calls were made, phone calls were taken. After spending eleven days on a Mexican cruise and a weekend in sunny beachside La Jolla, I am thrilled to say that it looks like I'll be visiting Iowa in the fall.

Yes, absolutely. No sarcasm, there. Wasn't it a year ago that I lamented the fact that I've never visited the heartland and had no idea when I might? Iowa, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho...they're like the New England states. If you live more than 300 miles away, you're not going to head there for vacation or by accident. You need to have a Reason. And I'm so pleased to have an opportunity to speak there that I'm actually considering extending my trip a day so I can add two states to my "States I've Slept In" map. So if you're a user group in Iowa or an adjoining state, get in touch...we might be able to arrange something.

The Map Of States I've Overnighted In currently stands thusly:

create your own personalized map of the USA

Florida shall fall in 2006...this I promise. Iowa's days are numbered.

On and on. On top of everything else, I need to assemble a "hunting license" for a friend of mine who will be working the New York City Comic-Con this weekend. Call it a symbol of friendship, call it a sign of foolishness, but he has offered to approach artists on my behalf and commission some sketches. There are a number of variables to navigate in that charter -- Will he actually find these artists? Will they actually be sketching at the convention? And will their dance-cards already be full by the time he gets past points One and Two? -- so the correct way to go is to give him a short and select list of names, a specific budget, and then pour him a ceremonial glass of rice wine after assuring him that he has both the blessings of the Emperor and the thanks of a grateful nation. Let's see what happens.

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Geekus Interruptus

Sunday, February 26, 2006 • 01:44:44 PM EST

An emergency transatlantic cablegram arrived early Saturday afternoon from one of my operatives in New York, providing an on-the-scene report from the New York Comic-Con: as it turns out, the situation was not so much Comic as Tragic. And not the usual sort of tragedy you can experience at a comix and sci-fi con...ie, in which you spot a middle-aged 300-pound man nonchalantly walking around in a Counsellor Troi costume, and then you frantically squeeze a whole bottle of Purell into your eyes.

No, it had to to with the crowds at the show. I'm sure that if the organizers of this inaugural NYC-CC had any idea how popular the event would be, they wouldn't have booked just one hall in the Javits Convention Center. Apparently, there are other shows going on in there at the same time. This is fantastic news for Adam West (who probably could have double- and even triple-booked himself into the boat show and the home show, too) but it's bad mojo for any comic geeks who failed to arrive an hour or two early. My operative showed up thirty minutes after the doors opened and he was turned away by state troopers. Yes, the overcrowding problem was so significant that phrases like "Coconut Grove" and "The Station Nightclub" were being bandied about; ultimately, the authorities were forced to impose martial law and install a colonial governor to run things until such a time as it could be determined that the native population was capable of self-rule.

The aforementioned operative was able to shrug this off. The only thing he lost was the time he spent getting from Queens to the Lower East Side. Actually, both of us are way ahead on the deal: the dough he was going to spend on comics, and the cash that he was going to spend on my behalf on art, can now be more prudently rolled into our lottery funds.

I can't imagine that John and I would be enjoying the same sort of nonchalant sang froid if either one of us had laid out $150 for transportation and $500 for weekend accommodations. Clearly, when Eric Idle wrote "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" and Bobby McFerrin wrote "Don't Worry...Be Happy" neither man had a massive pile of out-of-pocket expenses on their minds. But as-is, the 2006 show was a powerful argument in favor of our attending next year's show with a spirit of cheerful ambition and a lot of advance planning.

Damned straight there'll be a 2007 edition. When you're trying to establish a new annual event, you can't beat the PR value of attracting so many attendees that only a venue-encircling cordon of armed men could hold them back. If the Vietnamese had held a sci-fi convention in the American Embassy a year after Saigon fell, I'm certain that it would have gone gangbusters.

In contrast, the PR value of a New York Daily News piece that focuses on hip, exciting, and relevant-to-the-kids creators like Mort "Beetle Bailey" Walker is debatable.

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Coughing aching stuffy-head fever so I can Blog medicine

Tuesday, February 28, 2006 • 11:57:53 PM EST

Stage One: "My throat's a little sore. I hope I'm not getting a cold."

Stage Two: "Damn, I think I'm coming down with a cold. I'd better kick some ass today while I'm still in a productive state of health."

Stage Three: "Working with a cold sucks."

Stage Four: "Look, I'm just going to have to switch over to 'Being Sick' mode. If I focus full-time on rest and recuperation, I'll probably get over this quicker."

Stage Five through Stage Seven: I didn't take notes on any of these, because I was asleep.

Which brings us here to Stage Eight: "Look, I'm just going to have to switch back to 'Working with a cold' mode because all this sleep is leaving me absolutely exhausted." So I'm sitting up in my sickbed (sick-sofa, actually) getting in a solid half-day's work in between all the coughing and sniffling.

Yes, for the safety of the general populace I'm staying indoors as much as possible, to avoid being responsible for other people getting colds. But not for the direct reason you'd suspect; the virus is hardly the biggest threat. No, y'see, my usual lush, rich baritone has dropped another half an octave and frankly, even my most casual and innocent of utterances would trigger an immediate genetic response in the opposite sex...namely, to fling off their clothes and then fling themselves at me. The poor dears would quite simply catch her death there on the sidewalk and I'm far too great a gentleman to allow that to happen.

I did leave once today, to purchase another trio of lottery tickets. Again I cite my "whenever the size of the jackpot can be credibly expressed in relation to a billion dollars"; when the Mega Millions edged above a quarter-billion I was motivated to venture outside, gentleman or no.

Although my total fiscal 2006 commitment to the national lottery system now stands at a mere $8, I fear that I crossed some sort of line today. I fished some change out of my pocket while crossing the parking lot and the ticket popped out with it, tossed by the wind across the pavement.

Yes, of course I found myself chasing after it. You'd have done the same. Odds of winning are 1 in 150,000,000 at the greatest so the smart thing to do would have been to just let it go, and with it relieve myself of the responsibility of looking up the numbers after the drawing. But the world is filled with atheists who refuse to sign a piece of paper reading "I, the undersigned, confer ownership of my immortal soul, and all rights of usage, disposal, or transferal of ownership attendant persuant thereof, to the bearer of this document in perpetuity through this realm of existance and all others."

If days later, I learned that the winning ticket had been sold in the mini-mart where I'd bought mine, I would really have no alternative but to forsake God and country and wander the world, solving the trivial problems of the colorful strangers I happen to meet along the way and learning a poignant lesson about the human condition before moving on to the next town.

Must wrap up this posting, for tomorrow is a new month. The next post I make will use my blogger's new data structure -- you know, the one where it builds each HTML file from scratch every time, assembling content from a monthly content database -- and God only knows if it'll work. Best to enjoy the blog one last time while I've still got point-and-click functionality, I think.

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