I added the cookie-enable broadband/dialup switch. It's over at the bottom of the right sidebar. Give it a shot, see what you think. I've been fixing some other bugs here & there as well -- thanks to Kriston for help finding some of 'em.

UPDATE: Commenting wasn't working when you previewed. Thanks for pointing this out, Jeff!

Alright, here it is. A few things to note about it, if you're interested in this kind of stuff:

• It's designed to look good at resolutions of 1024x768 and higher, and probably won't even be very legible below 800x600.


• It's designed to be highly modifiable. You won't be stuck with the winter wonderland picture forever. All that it takes to completely redo the site's look is to drop a few nicely textured graphics into a prepared photoshop project with all the necessary masks ready to go. The faint gray line background, dashed borders, and transparency effects are the only aesthetic aspects of the site that will always be there.


• I mentioned transparency; that brings us to browser support. I spend a third of my life trying to convince Microsoft products to do what they're designed for. I'm not going to do it here, too. So this site was designed for Firefox. You should go get it if you don't have it -- there's a button in the sidebar. I have taken a stab at supporting IE via an alternate stylesheet that gets dropped in when IE is detected. But IE doesn't support the PNG graphics format properly, so things will necessarily look worse. I'm curious to hear reports of how things look in other browsers like Safari -- I don't have a Mac, so I couldn't test for it. Sorry. I'll whip up alternate stylesheets for Safari, Opera, etc, if necessary. Just let me know if they don't work.


• Speaking of alternate stylesheets, this site is now a bitch to load. Like, 250+k for the homepage. Yikes. That's because of the nice winter background (originally shot by Catherine) and because of the huge image that lets the sidebar background flow smoothly from one box to another. IE doesn't handle it very well -- it chokes on all those images and tiled backgrounds, and scrolls a bit more shakily than would be ideal. But then you should be using Firefox anyway, right? Right. Hopefully the page size won't be too painful for users -- most readers are on broadband, I suspect, and even those who aren't will be able to read text prior to the background graphics downloading. And those graphics should stay cached by most sane browsers for a good long time, preventing repeat downloads. However, if you really can't take it, I have designed a "Lite" mode. Right now you can get to it by appending "?lite=1" to the URL -- like so: http://www.zunta.org/blog/?lite=1. I'll be adding an option in the sidebar soon that sticks your preference in a cookie so you don't have to bother with the querystring nonsense. For now, just put up with the load times and know that this feature is coming.

I think that's it. I've got a few more things planned, but I'll likely get distracted by another project before I get to them. For now, please let me know what you think -- especially if you think "this breaks my computer".

UPDATE: Some things I'm considering changing already: the font, the line spacing, and the opacity of the transparent white box in which this text is appearing (it needs to be less translucent, I think). Thoughts?

Sigh. So nobody likes my handwriting -- it was option two, a few posts down. People say it evokes Avril Lavigne, or 8-bit "extreme" videogames, or lame youth outreach programs. That's okay. I can take it. No one ever said being a middle-class white guy was going to be easy (although I thought it was kind of implied).

But I've pressed on and come up with a new logo, one that nobody voted on, because let's face it, you can't put a decision as important as this one in the hands of the proletariat. Also Catherine didn't really like the other logo that much, anyway.

This morning I'm at a client office and experienced some excitement with my laptop power supply. Its cord's intermittent short began resisting all my best wiggling attempts, then burned a hole through itself. Whoops! One razor blade and a few feet of electrical tape later all is well, but I'd probably better get down to doing some actual work to make up for the lost time. Also, I need to try to figure out why this company stocks razor blades emblazoned with a promotional logo for one of their clients. Just what exactly are they getting up to at the Gleacher Executive Conference Center?

All of this is my roundabout way of saying that the redesign (which was responsible for the lack of posting yesterday) is almost complete. A few more bells & whistles need to be finished for IE compatibility, and then I've got to move it over from the development site -- but it should be up sometime this afternoon, just in time for everyone to bitch about how ugly it is before heading home for the day. Oh, and the comment system might break while I'm futzing around with things.

i thought this was kind of neat: European text messagers raise millions for Asian tsunami victims

Italian mobile phone users have donated more than 11 million euros (15 million dollars) for the victims of the Asian tsunamis through a text messaging arrangement that seemed to set a trend, it was reported.

The Rome daily Corriere della Sera said Italians could contribute one euro to tsunami disaster relief every time they sent a text message, thanks to an agreement between the country's four mobile phone companies and its main television channels.

text messaging in italy is absolutely insane - in fact, i think people there use it more than actually just phoning another person. i thought it was the greatest thing ever, and i really wonder why it hasn't seemed to ever catch on in the U.S. i mean, italians use text messages to discover cheating spouses; berlusconi sent 50 million text messages to urge people to vote for him; even the pope uses them to send his followers a daily spiritual message. one italian prankster even sent a text message to his wife from a plane claiming that there were terrorists on board. hysterical!

alternate category: Let's Try and Gain Some Perspective, Shall We?

"Tsunamis shatter celebrity holidays"

Sorry to spoil the surprise, but I've been working on a site redesign, and it's almost done. However, we've hit a snag: Catherine. That's right, my crazy girlfriend doesn't like part of the design I put together -- specifically, the logo. We've decided to do the fair thing and let you guys settle it.

So I present logo 1:

And logo 2:

Please let us know in comments which you prefer. We're really just concerned with the fonts -- don't worry about the colors. The design is intended to be flexible, letting me drop new color schemes and backgrounds into the design whenever I get around to it. You'll only have to suffer with the light blue for a couple of months, probably.

some of you know that i have a coworker and friend who is sri lankan and had been taking an extended holiday in colombo. we finally had an email from him this morning:

I am using one of those very rare moments with power supply to reply your letter. My mother and I are safe although I have lost many friends and relatives along with quite a bit of property that I had here. However I am much better off compared to many others who have suffered tremendous losses. I am not going to write a long letter as I might lose power while doing so.

i really have nothing to say about the tsunami, as the entire thing is so enormously tragic as to eclispe my ability to think about it. i can't even imagine it, really. 25,000 people, maybe as many as 40,000, gone.

anyway, here are some links about various things i've found through blog browsing about the tsunami:

And the horrific dystopian future won't be, either. Oh sure, I'm all about the merciless, unblinking machinebrains, with their cold calculations and algorithmically-precise contempt for humans. But it's going to take more than building SkyNet for the Terminator movies to come true. So toward that end:

• Scientists are working on a robot powered by a bacterial fuel cell. They envision building flying machines that can power themselves indefinitely by feeding on insects and fruit.


• Not scary enough? Well, this is a little old, but Japanese researchers have figured out a way to power devices with human blood.

Progress!

good news: alton brown of good eats is bringing his 2005 book tour to our area on january 18! if you haven't heard of mr. brown you should read this salon.com article, "TV chefs who don't bite." an excerpt from the piece sounds like it could have been written about tommy, who is an excellent cook and in love in a non-gay way with with brown:

How did my engineer boyfriend learn to cook so well? Certainly not from watching the food shows the cable TV channels dish up in abundance. The personality-driven recipe files of Emeril Lagasse, Nigella Lawson, Rachael Ray, Jamie Oliver, even Jacques Pepin entertain us, but they don't teach us much cooking. And "Iron Chef"? That's just a neo-feudalistic game show that happens to involve food.

Nope, Leonard and I aren't much for food shows. It's the geeky cooking shows we devour in search of explanations, technique, equipment tests and, yes, entertainment: Food Network's gimmicky-in-a-good-way "Good Eats" (which sometimes runs as often as three times in one day) and PBS's consumer-reports show "America's Test Kitchen" (check local listings), which explain the science and engineering behind good food. Leonard got his awesome sweet potato recipe from "ATK's" "Thanksgiving III" episode, and I'm looking forward to finding out what menu items from its holiday dinner show -- as well as from "Good Eats" episodes on cookies, fudge, cake and cheesecake -- will end up on his table later this month.

...Using more science than his "Test Kitchen" counterparts, Brown moves smoothly between theory and practice in every scene. Both shows throw out conventional wisdom when a cheaper, better or faster option seems obvious. Brown goes further, improvising ingredients and even equipment more often. Why buy a grill when you can make one from hardware-store parts? And at every step, we learn the chemistry and physics of the process, and thus how to vary the instructions to produce a different result. The "Test Kitchen" is a dedicated committee, but Brown is a crabby and brilliant tinker.

i appreciate this article for two reasons: it's about the european smart car and how it's starting to make a foray into american markets (yay!), and it contains a lovely little dig at tom cruise that was totally unnecessary in an article about cars:

"[The Smart Car] is the Tom Cruise of the automotive world, a teeny-tiny star with eye-catching looks."

GnuRadio has released a hardware peripheral that allows soft radio. This is going to be big. Very, very big.

Put in simple terms, this means that radio signals can be affordably processed by a general-purpose computer instead of a custom-built piece of hardware. All the frequencies flying through the air affect every bit of metal they come in contact with -- it's decoding those mashed-together frequencies meaningfully and in real time via a system electronic components that's the trick. Well, these guys have built a system that enables simulation of those components in software, allowing a single computer to emulate a vast array of radically different radio devices. It's already capable of receiving HDTV broadcasts. With the right software it could receive XM radio. Hell, with the right software a geek could now set up his own cell phone company. A big antenna (or lots of small ones) and some spectrum rights from the FCC are all that would be stopping him (well, okay -- this specific device would probably not be up to the task beyond the proof-of-concept level. But a similar one would be.).

The complete implications of this are still unclear. Up until now it's been a somewhat high-profile but imposibly nerdy project that no one was sure would ever bear fruit. But now it has -- or at least, it has overcome the theoretical hurdles that could have made software radio intractable, and released a tool making homebrew radio accessible to everyone. No one's sure exactly what effect these developments will have, but everyone seems to agree that it's a revolutionary shift in how broadcasting can be done -- and more importantly, by whom it can be done.

Satellite transmissions, police band communication, virtually anything that's broadcast can now be picked apart or put back together by your PC -- and that includes massively parallel attempts at decryption. Security through obscurity is no longer an option, nor is it far-fetched to imagine that folks will now spend their spare computer cycles trying to crack the encryption coming from HBO's satellite (or the government's) instead of searching for aliens.

This puts a lot of power in the hands of anybody with a thousand bucks. Look for it to be outlawed almost immediately.

merry day back at the office, everybody! woohoo! it's so exciting. *slits throat*

i hope everybody had wonderful christmases. my gift from santa this year was seven pounds straight to my ass, given in the form of four fatty, delicious, consecutive meals from thursday night until sunday. my grandparents' 80th birthday at l'auberge chez francois was out of this world; there were something like seven courses, and the service was absolutely impeccable, even though the waiter tried to serve wine to my 17 year old sister.

in other materialistic news, i mainly received a lot of clothing, gift certificates, alias season 1 dvd, and the best gift of all from tommy: jewelry in the form of diamonds.

...

diamond earrings, that is! HAHAHA. did i get anybody? i can hear tommy breaking out into a cold sweat from here.

the other best xmas gift to come our way was one downloaded illegally/purchased by tommy - DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION! you may think i kid, but it is the best thing ever. completely addictive, and a good workout to boot. screw marathon running, i'm going on a 24/7 DANCE MARATHON from now on.

anyway, the rest of 2004 will be spent completing my last grad school application (though i may apply to one or two more places, because i'm starting to panic about the fact that i've only applied to three grad schools total, and out of those three grad schools, only one would be not insane to admit me), and studying for my driver's license! yes, i've regressed and am 16 again! actually, i need to renew the license, and as it stands, i have two speeding tickets on my record. apparently if you have two or more moving violations, you must retake the computer test in order to keep your license. suckage. this is an embarrassing fact, but i failed my first driver's test the first time around. my mom told me to study, but i thought it was more important to make out with my 18 year-old, van halen-obsessed, ponytail-wearing boyfriend at the time the night before. if you can believe that i ever had a 18 year-old, van halen-obsessed, ponytail-wearing boyfriend when i was a sweet and clean-cut 15 year-old.

but this time, i will triumph on the test! i will blow the DMV away with my knowledge of how far back you must drive from a fire truck or how old a child must be to not have to sit in a safety seat. i can barely stand the suspense. it will be awesome.

Well, I hope everyone had a good Christmas and/or Channukah. Santa brought me just what I wanted: checks! Hurrah! I'm planning to wait until MacWorld and its inevitable surprise announcements pass by, then take the plunge and spring for an iPod. What'd you kids get?

Aside from the crass materialism, there've been some other good bits: seeing old friends who're back in town; watching It's A Wonderful Life (moral: never trust the handicapped); getting smacked down at MarioKart by Jeff's ten year-old brother's irritating friends; and Jon starting a new Christmas Eve tradition, as we unscrewed a very festive bottle of Thunderbird, which, surprisingly, none of us had previously sampled (for the similarly uncultured: think rubbing alcohol and sugar).

And then there was the family. Tending to the holiday emotional needs of divorced parents gets old pretty fast, but my sister and I managed to fulfill our filial duties without going completely crazy. Christmas Eve dinner with our Dad, his girlfriend Nancy and our Grandmother was particularly nice. Grandma's a retired English teacher and foreign service wife with a fiery intellect and a lovely Vermonter demeanor. I'm incredibly fond of her. And although it's a bit sad to see her decline progressing -- the 24th marked the first time I've seen her tell a story, and as she wrapped it up, begin telling the same story again -- she's still doing pretty well for a dame in her mid-nineties. And they're all good stories, anyway.

Christmas Day was spent with my Mom and her boyfriend Ray, and they'd decorated a tree, put together a vast array of fun little wrapped things under it (all addressed from "Donner", "Mrs. Claus" and the like, just like when I was a kid), and generally let me regress as far back into my childhood as I could while simultaneously complaining about lower back pain. Plus, Mom's chestnut stuffing: oh man. It's one of those rare foods that takes more calories to prepare than it provides, but fortunately I wasn't the one doing the shelling. Between that and a bitchin' turkey, it was a tasty spread, and a great way to pass the day.

So Christmas was good, although I'm still smack in the middle of the age range where I'm a kind of familial free agent, which makes things a little awkward and embarassingly wistful. But life is resuming back at the apartment, and we're all trying to figure out what to do with ourselves for New Year's -- a holiday that's clearly better-suited to dissolute twentysomethings.

Things aren't exactly busy at work, so I just fired up a game of Halo. I got beat, badly, by virtually everyone in the last round. But that's not the problem. One of the competitors was twelve. And, when it was all over, the winner (not the twelve year old, although he beat me too) said, "You suck, old guys! You suck!"

Hard to argue with that.

Good for the EFF. They've put some money behind an open-source project called Tor that might do a lot to stymy anti-P2P efforts. It's basically a SOCKS proxy -- install it on your computer (linux, windows, os x) and you'll join an ad-hoc P2P routing network. When you send a request from a given application -- your web browser, IM, BitTorrent, almost anything -- it'll be encrypted and sent through a random series of peers in the network to disguise where it's coming from. This isn't foolproof, for a number of reasons that are better explained by the project wiki, but it'll be fine for most uses.

However, Tor is also a potential liability: while the whole point of the system is that a user doesn't know what traffic is going through his system, that doesn't mean the law won't try to hold you responsible for it. Some Tor users have reported getting C&D letters for traffic that didn't belong to them. It seems unlikely that you could be held responsible for other people's traffic that gets routed through your system -- industry lawyers have tried this already, and the courts, realizing that it could mean the end of the internet, have arrived at an at least somewhat-agreeable detente with the ISPs. However, you probably don't want to be the first person to go through the process of confirming my hunch. So: caveat emp-Tor.

More details of the MPAA's current campaign against BitTorrent are emerging. A cease & desist letter has leaked, addressed to the owners of demonoid.com. A couple of things jump out:

• The identities of demonoid's owners aren't known by the letter writers. The letter was sent to their ISP with a request that it be forwarded. Presumably this information would be subpoenaed when and if the MPAA decides to proceed with litigation. I haven't been keeping up with the state-of-the-art in DMCA interpretation, but the fact that they don't yet have these guys' names is encouraging.
• Although demonoid was certainly trading pirate material, actual evidence of infringement may be scarce. There's a warning in the letter not to destroy any evidence. If demonoid's owners were smart they just ran the tracker and didn't host any seeds (content). BitTorrent's pseudo-centralized, yet peer-to-peer nature means that the folks with the most important functional role in the distribution network may not be legally culpable.
• The letter-writers aren't very tech savvy. They repeatedly refer to an IP address that, by definition, cannot exist (66.250.450.10), and their list of infringing works includes a .nfo file (a metadata text file created by the original pirate, to which they presumably have no copyright claim), plus the listing of an archive AND its extracted contents -- it seems like they probably don't understand what all these files are
• The list of infringing files is depressing for two reasons. First, they include recently-aired broadcast television shows like Desperate Housewives. The law's unambiguous on this: the networks own these shows and have a right to control how they're disseminated. Still, they're broadcast for free over the airwaves, and it would have been nice if ABC/Disney had elected to grant (or continue to implicitly allow) some limited license allowing the transfer of these shows temporarily -- until the DVD release, perhaps. My worry is that a poorly-constructed court decision or piece of legislation could have negative effects on other kinds of fair use (like my beloved TiVo).

  Finally, the other depressing aspect of this is that someone might be going to jail or driven into bankruptcy for pirating the Garfield movie. How do you ask a man to be the first to go to jail for a shitty, shitty movie?

well, i had the brilliant idea that taking pictures of our party without any sort of flash would be wonderful, and the photos came out accordingly. that is, shittily. but i'll still post them. because i'm an exhibitionist! behind the cut.

oh yeah - i had been meaning to post this site, found by julie, which analyzes a photo of your face and tells you all sorts of things about yourself, like your ancestry, intelligence levels, what salary you make, etc. i'm not sure how accurate it is, but it sure is fun! here's my info:

racial ananlysis:

19% Eastern European
32% Anglo Saxon
36% Korean/Japanese
13% Chinese

(i find this weird - i do have an eighth of chinese in me, as i'm fond of telling people, but no korean or japanese, so i'm not sure why that percentage was so high. as far as i remember, my dad's side is mostly anglo-saxon, and i don't think we've got any eastern european, at least not in the last few generations.)

Personality Profile Rank
Intelligence 6.2 Average Intelligence
Risk 4.4 Low Risk
Ambition 6.0 Average Ambition
Gay Factor 1.5 Very Low Gay Factor
Honor 5.2 Average Honor
Politeness 5.7 Average Politeness
Income 6.4 $30,000 - $50,000
Sociability 5.8 Average Sociability
Promiscuity 3.5 Low Promiscuity

well, they're right in that i have a low gay factor. and i'm average in all other regards. woohoo!

Personality Profile, White Collar:

You especially enjoy the traditional way of life. Having drinks with your friends, attending parties and relaxing while watching TV are some of your simple pleasures. You may also enjoy physical exercise. Your driving force is to retire as early as possible, so that you can do the things you enjoy more often. Your main source of ambition comes from this desire.

You dont particularly like your job but you do it without complaining. You realize that the income that it provides is essential to your lifestyle. You are friendly yet competitive with your co-workers. This competitiveness may lead you to squander your earnings to match other peoples' possessions.

You operate most effectively when there is a set power structure, and the lines of authority are clear. You know your place in the ranks, you play by the rules, and will deliver what is expected of you. You do not care for responsibility; you would rather be care free.

Your view of other types
You sometimes disagree with Boss types, but you respect them for the most part. You may even be envious of their lifestyles. You find Academic types boring and uptight. You have very little in common with them. However some White collar types may respect the accomplishments for certain Academic types. You think that Artist types are unrealistic and immature. You like interacting with Charmer types, and sometimes envy their charisma. You perceive Gambler types mostly as loners and untrustworthy. However, since you may have to interact with them on a daily basis you are not hostile to them. You believe Drifters are too lazy to work for a living but you sometimes feel pity for them.

Other types' view of you
Boss types may have some things in common with Blue collar types, but for the most part they only interact with you during the course of business. Academics see White collar types as unsuccessful versions of themselves, but because of work situations they may have to interact with you often. Artists do not interact with you, for they consider you to be a slave of conformity. Charmer types may associate with you; they find that the collar types are the people that mostly want to hang around them. To the Drifter types your repetitive routines seem boring; they would prefer having more fun and excitement. They may however enjoy the company of some Blue collar types.

obviously this isn't the best indicator of everything (i got almost exactly the same profiles/ratings as julie, so i don't know that they actually differentiate that much between people), but i think it's fun. give it a shot!

UPDATE - haha, i put in a random photo of tommy and it said he was 51% chinese and 49% korean, when he has absolutely no asian in him. but a different picture said 29% Eastern European and 71% Southern European. who knows? but both times it did say he was an Artist Type.

so, posting will no doubt be light in the next week or so (from my side at least) as i get thursday and friday off from work and will be in the full throes of all the holiday activies. i've got fun stuff planned for the next few days: tomorrow evening my family, my uncle's family, my grandparents (who are in town from laramie, wyoming) and tommy and i are going out to dinner at l'auberge chez francois to celebrate my grandparents' 80th birthdays. this french alsatian country inn in great falls, va, is apparently THE place to go for fancy occasions, and its food and service are supposed to be out of this world. and i'm thrilled to be celebrating my grandparents' birthdays with them - they are totally amazing people and wonderful grandparents, even though i don't get to see them as much as i would like since they're out in wyoming. my grandfather, francois dickman, is the american-born son of two belgian immigrants who were french professors at the university of wyoming. he got his master's from the fletcher school of law and diplomacy, and went on to serve in WWII and the korean war. he then became a foreign service officer, first being stationed in colombia (where my uncle was born), and later serving as ambassador to both the united arab emirates and kuwait, in the late 70s/early 80s. he's fluent or near-fluent in french, arabic and spanish, and overall just informed on just about everything (including miniature ship building and wyoming history), even though i really don't think he enjoyed his grandchildren until they could hold conversations with him :) AND he thought the iraq war would be a shitstorm from the start.

my grandmother is the daughter of otis hoy, who was a chinese-american who moved from san francisco to cheyenne, wyoming in the early 1900s (god knows why). she graduated from UW with degrees in agriculture, home economics, and food and nutrition, and then met my grandfather and traveled with him all over the world - and from what i understand, being the wife of a diplomat is essentially like being a diplotmat yourself. when my grandparents moved back to laramie in the 80s, she became heavily involved in community service and volunteering, and won the Laramie Community Service Award in 2003. plus she's just about the most amazing chef that i know.

so, anyway, happy birthday grandma and grandpa! look how cute they are! (without fail, my grandfather has that befuddled look in photographs, like, "what is this camera thing you point at my face?".)

in other news, i really want this breadmaker so i can make this panettone recipe. if you've never had panettone, you are doing yourself a disservice - it's an italian (milanese in particular) cake, made exclusively around the holidays, and it's just delicious. look! there's even a wiki for it!

and in other other news, i woke up with a cold this morning, and even though i've already popped several zinc tablets, i still feel crappy. so i'll sign off for now.

happy holidays!

mssr. jeff nye, who's in town from berkeley, took some photos of our holiday party last friday. they're awesome, particularlythis one, which is ESPECIALLY flattering! i'll try to get my photos up tonight.

New study: cellphone radiation can cause non-repairable genetic damage in vitro.

Don't panic just yet, though. Cellphone radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that -- so far as we know -- its absorption has no effect on molecules other than to heat them up. Heating up a huge, delicate molecule like DNA will inevitably increase the rate at which it spontaneously decays, particularly when dealing with tiny cell cultures in which the heat can't diffuse as well as it can in a real organism. The study accounts for this to some extent by using a per-kilogram absorption figure to rate the transmission power, but it's still tough to see how this kind of research can be considered as useful as a population study -- and so far, population studies on the health effects of cell phone use have been inconclusive. This paper may be worth paying attention to, but probably not worth fretting over.

Besides, whether or not cell phones are killing you right now, they'll naturally get less potentially deadly as technology advances. Transmitter power is likely to decrease in the future as network access points proliferate. Take a look at wifi: your laptop's wireless card transmits at 200 milliwatts or so. Compare that to your cell phone's 300 milliwatt capability -- and then consider that for 1.5x the power, your cell phone delivers bandwidth a little bit less than a 56k modem. That's possible because your wireless router is a lot closer to your laptop than your cell tower is to your phone.

Generally speaking, the more cell towers/access points/transceivers you have, the less power you need for a given bandwidth. I think the broad trend is likely to be toward many more transceivers. The upshot will be that you'll have to shoot less electromagnetic radiation into your temporal lobe every time you call home to see if you should pick up some milk.

I'll admit that some technologies -- wimax being the first that springs to mind -- are working against such a movement, but the fact remains: it's a lot easier to send a signal down a wire than through the air. We should use copper to get data as close to the consumer as possible. It might be better for our health; it's definitely better engineering.

Another Monday, another crushing loss at pub quiz. On the upside, we've once again confirmed that it's possible to cash hypothetical credit toward a non-fiery afterlife in exchange for cheap bar swag. Which is to say we won the team name competition with another horribly offensive entry: "Riding Metro Costs an Arm and a Leg". Subtract ten points for the cliche, but add a hundred for poor taste.

A better entry: "You come to pub quiz with the team you have, not the team you want". Fortunately for us, the same joke was made by another team (except involving pencils); I think that's what gave us the win.

And what was our prize? Another set of t-shirts and DC United tickets? Some money of our bar tab? An order of buffalo wings with a laughably sincere Irish backstory? Nope. Four candy canes. Man, that was totally worth sticking around for.

The MPAA's recently announced campaign against websites hosting BitTorrent trackers seems to be paying its initial dividends: a few BT sites have shut down, including the relatively venerable Suprnova.org.

Some folks thought that Slovenia-based Suprnova would be immune, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Legal action isn't shutting these sites down, so jurisdiction is irrelevant. The threat of legal action is all that's required; some schmo from Slovenia is likely to be bankrupted just by going through the process of figuring out if the MPAA can come after him; if the answer turns out to be yes, he'd REALLY screwed. The only viable option is to fold up shop.

In fact, while it's obvious that these sites aren't operating in good faith, it's not clear that any of them are actually breaking the law. Since the INDUCE act failed to pass, the crucial distinction seems to be whether torrent sites can be considered "common carriers" -- clearinghouses of information for which the site's owners are not ultimately responsible. One of the most effective ways to find pirate torrents is Google, after all, and nobody's going after them.

Well, all that's a bit irrelevant, right? The question is where to go now when you find out your VCR didn't tape Lost. There are plenty of answers:

• There are still a lot of suprnova-style torrent sites that haven't yet succumbed to the MPAA's campaign, thanks either to their small size or a foolishly brazen appraisal of their legal liability. No one knows if they'll be able to tough it out, but for now TorrentSpy, FileList, EliteTorrents and The Pirate Bay are all still up.
• As always, IRC remains the internet's wild west, and torrent traffic seems to be retreating there. EFNet hosts the channels #bt and #bt-gm -- which conveniently provide web interfaces here and here so you can find what you want before wading into IRC. You'll need an IRC client, but from there you just need to hop on the network, join the channel, and type !rules or !triggers or whatever the welcome message tells you to. That should provide you with instructions for connecting to an FServe bot, from which you'll be able to download the torrent file. It sounds complicated, I know. I'll be honest: it sort of is. But only at first -- once you understand the system, it's not a bad one to navigate.
• Finally, there's the aforementioned Google. A particularly neat development is a little program called GTorrent. Behold the power of Slashdot! Someone posted an idea for the program at 2pm, and the idea was implemented and available online by midnight. Not bad. The program sends a google search for torrent files, then tries connecting to each returned result to see if the torrent is still active. Pretty slick, although it's Windows-only at the moment -- and you'll need the .NET environment installed (win2k and xp should already have this; downloads are available for 9x).

There are also some efforts underway to build BitTorrent clients that look more like traditional P2P apps -- Suprnova was working on such a system, called eXeem, although it's not clear if they'll continue to pursue it in light of their decision to shut their website's doors. I have doubts about this endeavor -- I think such a design mistakenly assumes that BitTorrent as a whole is suffering from the liabilities of a centralized architecture simply because individual torrents have a somewhat centralized nature. Creating a distributed system may seem like it would make the network harder to track down, but in practice it'll necessarily codify a specific port range and actually make it easier to locate and shut down BT traffic. On the other hand, technical merit frequently takes a back seat to novelty and stealth -- witness the uselessness of FreeNet versus the technically ho-hum but excellent-in-practice SoulSeek -- so if it's ever released, eXeem might be worth a look.

excuse me, but what the fuck? i don't often order things from online sites, and my current experience with amazon is not encouraging me to do so more in the future. i ordered a slew of christmas presents from them on december 12th and ordered standard shipping (3-5 days). i tracked my packages over the weekend, as i hadn't received a notification of shipment email from them, and was dismayed to find out that they had not yet shipped, and in fact wouldn't be shipping until december 20th at the earliest. i freaked out and upped my standard shipping to two-day shipping, because with standard shipping they "estimated" it would get there by december 24th. yes, leave me with 12 hours or less to receive and wrap a dozen presents - thanks, asshats. so now i'm paying extra money, and they only upped my date of receiving the order to december 23rd. a whole day earlier than what they promised me with standard shipping. today's the 20th, and they STILL haven't shipped out my packages.

is this normal operating procedure for amazon? what's going on? are they going to RUIN MY CHRISTMAS?

In her last post, Catherine mentioned a ceramic monkey that we won at my office Christmas party. Well, here are some photos. I couldn't be more pleased with this little monstrosity. The photos don't quite capture the sense of aggressive butt-pointing that forms the fundamental concept behind (cough) the piece. But I do think they'll give you an idea of why I have no regret about winning this, rather than the "12 Months of the Governator" calendar.

There are two more after the jump.

merry early xmas everybody! this weekend was holidayastic. first off was the much-vaunted holiday party at our apartment. it went off without a hitch, even though i had previously felt like i was going to die as a result of my over-indulgence at the DCist happy hour (btw, drew has got some photos of the happy hour here; i'm in the brown sweater and beige scarf). but i rallied, and decorated, and watched as jeff and tommy made fantastic egg nog, and then i proceeded to make the Worst Mulled Wine Ever, that tasted like toilet cleaner (if toilet cleaner were made with too much cheap brandy), but jeff also doctored that with just enough sugar to make it drinkable, and when i say just enough sugar, i think he maybe used like 3 pounds.

we probably had about 30 people at any given point, including my lovely ex-roommates; several awesome DCist-ers; geremy heitz, whom i hadn't seen in something like three years; jason and corbin, who announced that their wedding will be black tie, to the squeals of girls and the groans of their male friends; many of the usual suspects; and the girl to whom i must now award the Party Trooper of the Year Award, miss smith, who came to the party even though SHE HAD A 6AM FLIGHT THE NEXT MORNING AND AS I HAVE JUST NOW DISCOVERED WAS ALSO AT THE SAME TIME SUFFERING FROM A TERRIBLY INFECTED TONSIL AND STILL WILL FLY TO KIEV TOMORROW TO PROMOTE DEMOCRACY, WORLD PEACE, AND CHOCOLATE, AND SACRIFICE HER CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEARS. there are not enough capital letters in the world to express my amazement. anyway, i took some pictures, so i'll try to put them up this evening.

I'm also in surprisingly bad shape this morning, although I'm optimistic that things are about to turn a corner. While I'm waiting for that to happen I'm at least managing to worry a lot about constructing a playlist for the party. I've been doing what comes naturally: instead of actually getting started, I've been looking up tangentially related topics on the internet.

Which brings me to this: the good folks at the MIT Media Lab have put together a Christmas album! Or more accurately, they've put together some systems that put together a Christmas album. Details are sketchy, but "A Singular Christmas" seems to have been constructed algorithmically, using a lot of traditional Christmas music as the system's input. Their webserver is getting slashdotted at the moment, but I'm very curious to hear what it's like.

This is only the beginning, people. I foresee robotic wassailing aids for the elderly and disabled, untearable nanotech wrapping paper spun from spider silk, and eggnog-flavored barium (for merrier colon exams). God bless us every one. At least until a more efficient, distributed and massively parallel peer-to-peer blessing system can be developed.

oy. DCist happy hour. i went into the evening forgetting the First Rule of Everything: bloggers are a bunch of fucking alcoholics, and they will hitch you to their downwards spiral until you are blathering incoherently on the floor of the big hunt. but overall, it was quite fun. the DCist staff was out in full force, and i had the pleasure of meeting jason, missy, austin, seeing michael again, and enjoying the company of various other blogless people.

anyway, this morning i feel in pain and terribly puffy, which probably has something to do both with the massive amounts of alcohol i ingested last night and the massive amount of food i ingested at the company party. i have sad news: i did not win the bakeoff. my hopes were crushed 15 minutes before the party, when i went into the conference room to set out my eggnog cookies, and was faced with a plethora of professional-looking desserts. turns out many of my coworkers are competitive about baking to the nth degree. a very good cherry pie ended up winning, but i was still satisified with the eggnog cookies, because thus far i've had six people, including the president, ask me for the recipe, and two people have insinuated darkly that if only they'd been the judges, i'd be holding the winner's gift certificate to williams-sonoma right now. oh well, such is life. the circle goes on.

especially with the kickass party that is about to happen tonight! i'm very excited, because several people i thought wouldn't be able to make it can, like mr. jason and mizz corbin, and mr. germ heitz, whom i haven't seen in ages. holla. i feel pretty crappy right now, but with the power of 5 bottles of gatorade, my cute gauzy green top, and a shot of espresso, i will hopefully be in top hostessing form tonight. you know what that means: your cups will always be full, and by 11pm i'll end up slurring at you, "you know, i really think, you are like, so beautiful, yeah? and i'm like, so glad that you came to the party, and it is so awshum, like, that we are friendsh."

UPDATE: okay, this is getting drastic. does that hair of the dog thing actually work for hangovers? because i'm about ready to go hold up a liquor store, take half a handle of vodka and chug it at my desk if it'll make me feel any better.

I was all set to make fun of DCist's bubble tea post -- it was going to go something like this: "Seriously, who gives a shit?" -- but amazingly it's turned into a pretty popular thread, with lots of folks sharing their recommendations for the best place to get this horrible treat.

This seems strange to me. For one thing, is this bubble tea junk really such a new phenomenon? I remember Asian student groups setting up tables on the Lawn in Charlottesville, hawking bubble tea with a cheery fervor matched only by the creepy Falun Gong adherents who'd occasionally wander around the Rotunda. I don't think it was a fundraising drive. I think they just really, really liked the crap.

Why is completely beyond me. In every formulation I've encountered, bubble tea is simply disgusting sweet tea with the addition of some milk and choking hazards. The tapioca is flavorless and chewy, and the tea is disconcertingly orange. I can appreciate bubble tea as an impressive engineering feat -- the precisely sized straw, the hermetically sealed cups, the little robot box in that Berkeley store that quietly hummed as it laid its tapioca eggs. But you know, Frankenstein was also well-engineered. Still an abomination, though.

So okay, tastes differ, but why the strange zeal for this particular product? It's not like Asia suddenly needs to make a contribution to world cuisine -- they invented General Tso's, for God's sake -- candied fried chicken! It's perhaps the greatest culinary innovation of all time (I anxiously await chocolate french fries)! Seriously guys, take my advice: learn to rest on your laurels till you've got another winner.

The Post has an article today on the shifting landscape of copyright law, focusing on how Arlen Specter's elevation to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee may produce an environment less sympathetic to the content industry, if only because former chairman Orrin Hatch was squarely in the RIAA's pocket.

The article is an extended guess -- some folks think Specter will be preoccuppied with other issues and allow Hatch to continue to lead on IP law; others think Specter's detail-oriented nature will lead him wade into the debate, and that he may be more amenable to listening to organizations like the EFF.

Nobody really knows -- the article's evidence consists mostly of quotes from anonymous staffers talking up their bosses. All that you can really say is the end of Hatch's term is a good thing. Aside from sponsoring the vile DMCA, the man has approached copyright issues with a perspective warped by his aspirations to a recording career. I suppose brutally lame intellectual property deserves protection too, but I'm inclined to think that a chairman who identifies more with the commons than the content-owners would be a good thing.

Shit. Reading In Shaw, I just realized that this apartment is the first place I've lived in the DC area that doesn't use natural gas for heating its air and water. Given the progressively-longer blackouts the area has faced the past couple of years (thanks to snow, hurricane remnants, badly-timed storms, and utility repairmen turning into pillars of salt), what the hell is gonna happen? I'll tell you what: the District's frozen-corpse-removal budget is going to need to account for another 400lbs or so.

In a flurry of panic, I just tried to put up the insulating plastic I bought for the windows months ago -- no dice. The windows are about an inch too big.

Sigh. I guess I'd better start on those memoirs.

for my dear roommates. my dear, halo-playing, x-box obsessed roommates. (actually, compared to the holed-up, projectile-vomiting losers in this article, they're practically saints.) via lostremote.

some choice quotes:

>>"I played the first one," she said. "There are weird aliens and they wave their arms above their head when you shoot them and then they run around. It just doesn’t make sense. There’s no story, there’s no plot, there’s no background—it’s just ‘save your troop from alien invaders.’ I don’t understand how someone could sit there for eight straight hours and play a video game."

>>"It’s so dorky," said Ms. Griffin, "the most ridiculous form of male bonding I’ve ever witnessed. They just all sit in their own homes in front of the TV with these headsets on, like they’re operators. They turn the volume up, so you can hear them talking to each other. They have teams, and they find other teams to play—kids who play all day, 14-year-olds. They trash-talk with them …. I’m like, ‘Can we do something? Like walk the dog?’"

>>"He works so much," Ms. Deppe said of her Halo-addicted boyfriend. "I let him have his fun when he can." Ms. Deppe said it’s when he plays with his friends—and she comes along for the day—that she begins to feel like a useless appendage, surrounded by chortling man-boys. "When he’s alone, it doesn’t bother me; he plays video games and I paint," she said. "But when he’s with his friends and they play together, I think, ‘Why am I here?’ They make weird faces; their mouths start to hang open a little bit; their heads sort of go back and forth."

>>Mr. Chattoraj, the attorney, described how he used to gorge on Halo when his fiancée went out of town for business. "I would start playing on a Friday night and play until 8:30 the next morning," he said. "It feels like you were out partying. You think, ‘What have I done? I didn’t sleep—I feel sick.’ I’ve actually thrown up from motion sickness because I get too close to the TV—not uncommon with first-person shooter games, because things are moving around and you’re ducking and jumping, but you’re really just sitting in one place. Kathy had a friend over—they were in the living room, and I was in the bedroom—and the friend was leaving. She poked her head in, and I had total tongue sweat. As soon as she left, I ran into the bathroom and projectile-vomited."

>>Mr. Clute’s girlfriend lives in California, and he said he would never ditch her for Halo. On the other hand, "maybe she’d just play the video games with me," he said. "But then she’d want to have sex or something, and that would get in the way." He laughed at himself. In the background, one could hear piercing cries, something to the effect of "Why won’t you just die?"

UPDATE: in case anyone cares, this is what i'll do. tonight i think kriston and susan are coming over for some wednesday night tv viewing (first two episodes of lost and the finale of america's next top model). meanwhile i will bake batches of both the eggnog thumbprints and the peppermint bark cookies. i'm assuming charles and tommy will be around as well, so the four of them will act as my objective taste-testers. when they come to a consensus on the better cookie, i will bake an extra batch of that particular cookie and bring it into work tomorrow. then i will proceed to win many awards and the admiration and awe of all my coworkers.

of course, i also plan on buying a bottle of wine tonight, so this entire plan could be shot to hell.
----
well, my company is having a holiday bakeoff tomorrow. that's right, we're so poor that we can even afford to have desserts bought for our holiday party. just kidding. actually, i love this idea because a) i like to bake and b) i am as competitive as all get out. i have to win this bakeoff, or else my self-esteem will crumble into a million little pieces, much like a badly constructed cookie.

anyway, i am stressing out about what exactly i should bake. it's got to be good, obviously, but it also has to make people feel like it's really the holidays - creamy, rich, and maybe pepperminty. here are my options thus far. which sounds best? and if you have any super awesome recipes, please let me know. I MUST WIN.

>>Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookies (with a holiday twist) (only thing is that i don't have peppermint bark, and don't know if i can get it on such short notice. maybe whole foods has some? i could make some, but it would take a lot of work and perhaps be a spectacular failure.)

>>eggnog thumbprints

>>gingerbread bars with lemon cream cheese icing (i've made these before and they turned out pretty well)

>>double-ginger cookies (subscription only, so here are the ingredients: 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup chopped crystallized ginger
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 1/4 cups sugar, divided
1/2 cup applesauce
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
Cooking spray)

My fellow nerds are aware that this year, sports videogames took a big price hit. ESPN bought up Sega's brand line -- formerly NFL2Kx, NBA2Kx, etc -- and released them for $20 a pop, $30-$40 less than the industry leader Electronic Arts prices its Madden franchise. EA had to drop its prices. Competition was beginning to offer advantages to the consumer!

Well, rest easy, because the threat is over. EA has bought exclusive rights to produce NFL games for the next 5 years. And all at a bargain price of $300+ million!

The best part: this is just the tip of EA's evil iceberg. We've covered the monopolist tendencies; now have a look here for the sweatshop angle. I hope that $300 million contract left them with some money to expand their PR department.

for you lost fanatics out there, like moi: every week i read this chat transcript with kristin veitch, who is the TV correspondent for E! news. sometimes she's got good spoilers, sometimes it's a dud. this week she hinted at something SERIOUSLY disturbing. it's behind the cut if you want to know what i think (and no, it's not a major spoiler having to do with the overarching plot line of why they're on the island, etc. it's a character thing).

A disturbing piece has popped up, via Slashdot: a guy named Greg Aharonian is suing to remove copyright protection from computer programs. He maintains that instead, IP protection should be offered by patents.

This makes sense in principle, but is a terrible idea in practice. Getting a copyright is easy -- if you've written something, you have at least some copyright protection. Getting a patent is difficult -- it's expensive, it takes a long time, and you have to demonstrate that your invention is new and non-obvious. A lot of redundant and obvious software techniques have managed to get patents, but this is due to the USPTO's almost complete inability to deal with software patents competently, not because patents are well-suited to software. If the patent system -- properly applied -- was the sole source of IP protection for software, not only would the system be shifted to favor large companies with the resources to file lots of patents, but the vast majority of software authors would be producing work that could be legally appropriated by whoever cared to copy it. I'm not someone to equate piracy with the end of civilization, but if businesses weren't compelled to buy software licenses it does seem likely that the industry and our economy would suffer.

Aharonian has a point, though. Despite some valiant efforts by computer scientists to pawn it off as speech, computer code really doesn't express ideas in the way that copyright law seems intended to protect. Still, just because our IP law is ill-equipped to handle the information economy doesn't mean we should dismantle the jerry-rigged protections it does afford.

The problem with software patent is that there are very few software innovations that could not be developed given a hundred geeks at a hundred PCs and adequate supplies of cola. Those innovations that do rise to this level tend to be highly abstract algorithms that are largely mathematical in nature -- a faster way to sort data, for example. But these discoveries approach the level of fundamental mathematical truths, and allowing them to be patented would be as problematic as requiring engineers to buy licenses for the quadratic equation.

And in any case, the development of such algorithms is rare. Software patents are more commonly awared for inventions like Amazon's infamous "one-click" patent --which actually covers basically all business conducted over the internet (Amazon has thus far declined to enforce it). Patents liek this are for trivial ideas that clearly could easily have been thought up with by someone else first (and frequently have -- the USPTO is very bad at finding prior art for software patents). They're obvious -- Amazon has not done the public a big favor by developing this knowledge, and consequently they don't deserve special protection. Yet they have it -- and unlike patents most other fields, software patents are a potentially huge pain in the ass: if someone patents a better mousetrap, that doesn't interfere with my existing mousetrap business. But if Amazon starts enforcing their patent for performing transactions over the internet, I have to be on my toes to avoid infringing upon it as I write any number of glaringly obvious applications.

There's not much genius involved in software development, but there is frequently a huge amount of work. That work deserves to be protected. Just because computer code is philosophically more similar to an invention than it is to speech doesn't mean that the patent system is the most appropriate way to protect it -- in practice, protecting code as an invention would not serve the industry or the public's best interests. Mr. Aharonian is trying to make a principled point while ignoring the damage that doing so would incur. It's a good thing that he seems likely to fail.

goddamn, "sideways" is on one hell of a streak. it seems i barely heard about this movie before it received, oh, EVERY AWARD EVER THAT'S NOT AN OSCAR. named best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, best actor, supporting actress, picture, screenplay at the new york film critics circle [jerk] awards, and it led the pack at the golden globes with seven nominations.

in case you haven't heard of sideways, it's written and directed by alexandrer payne (who did "about schmidt"), it stars paul giamatti, and IMDB describes it thusly:

Miles Raymond, a failed writer and divorcé who teaches junior high school english takes his best friend, former hot actor Jack on a weeklong drive up to California's wine country. There they explore the nature of their failures and question their relationships. Jack, about to get married, has an affair with a woman and wonders whether he should call off his wedding. Miles questions whether or not he made the right choice while trying to form a relationship with the woman's best friend, a fellow onephile who is a waitress at a restaurant that he frequents often when visiting that part of the country.

i think there are many reasons we should go see this movie. a) it is about wine. b) we can probably sneak in a few flasks of wine to drink while watching it.

what? isn't that enough?

the upstate life, who is on top of all the motherfucking shizznit (yes, i just said that), follows up on tommy's discovery a while back and announces that the arcade fire are definitely coming to d.c. the date: january 30. the place: 9:30 club. the tickets: you can buy them here. i just purchased four - one for me, tommy, possibly my brother, and an extra for whoever might like it in case it sells out. i suggest getting them now - you can't buy tickets yet on the 930 club page (hell, it's not even announced on their site yet), so you'll be getting in ahead of the game.

update: while TUL is where i caught it, i see the ghost of gordon sumner actually reported the arcade fire date and location first this past saturday. in any case, props to everybody for being more on top of this than i, even though i tried to make a point of looking out for the date/location. i suck. except at liking the arcade fire. we liked them back in june. take that, pitchfork!

tommy was surprised that the band was playing the 9:30 club - we had definitely pegged them for a black cat show. if they can sell out the 1200+ person 9:30 club, then they are more than buzz-worthy. of course, that's contingent on the 9:30 club ever officially announcing the date. they seem to be dropping the ball lately on the calendar announcements.

last week i mentioned to tommy that i had heard marissa from the O.C. was going to (gasp!) have a steamy lesbian kiss. apparently the O.C.'s ratings this year are good, but nowhere near as stellar as last year's. magic formula to boost ratings: insert a hot lesbian makeout! and voila, you've got boys tuning in, the media covering it, and probably crazy rightwing groups who will make a shitstorm and give it all even more publicity.

well, to follow up: seeking irony points me to an article that says not only will marissa kiss a girl, she will also be having a lesbian relationship. and the lipstick lesbian on the receiving end? alex, seth's new girl (who, despite looking like she's 30, is actually only 20).

i can only imagine the spirals of neuroses that this will cause seth to suffer. maybe he'll finally admit his erotic love for ryan. anyway, creator josh schwartz sez:

"Alex is someone who's emancipated from her parents, and is a little bit of a free spirit who becomes Marissa's mentor — she takes her under her wing and all of a sudden Marissa finds herself connecting."

Reports began to surface last week about the upcoming storyline, although just who Marissa would end up with in this new relationship left everyone scratching their heads — until now.

"Marissa is at a place where she's willing to try [a lesbian relationship] and she's open to that," Schwartz says. "We'll build it up to a kiss [between Marissa and Alex] and then a relationship develops."

Schwartz says the "big kiss" between the characters will be shot this week.

The hot new story arc begins next month on the Thursday-night Fox drama and will last for "multiple episodes" into the spring.

"We've already started shooting a lot of scenes with their relationship," he said. "Everybody is really comfortable with it, and the girls are really game and excited to play off of each other."

Schwartz says he is not thumping for ratings, insisting he formulated the storyline last summer.

"We're trying to figure out bigger arcs for our characters," he says. "This felt like a really interesting way to go. It's something that felt organic to the character.

"I've been surprised by the reaction, but I'm thrilled — we'll take it."

Thanks to Catherine for pointing this out: the teacher who wrote in to Gawker about Clay Aiken being -- surprise! -- a showbiz phony, has been suspended by her school district.

Okay, she used profanity in the message she sent to Gawker. But the email was submitted anonymously and the facts of her account don't seem to be in dispute, so it's tough to see why the district bothered to track her down and exact their admittedly not-so-terrible vengeance (a one-week suspension, with pay). I guess Clay did threaten to "make trouble" if anyone went to the press, so maybe that sent them running scared.

A crooner prone to vague threats and acting like an asshole, huh? Is it too early to crown the new Sinatra?

well, i sent off application #2 into the ether. or wherever grad school applications go to die. looking it over, i realized i have no shot of getting in. anywhere. ever. excuse the fatalism. i know it's heavy-handed, but it's, for some reason, how i deal effectively with reality.

i don't feel much like blogging; anyway, tommy is doing a better job of taking care of the blog than i could. i'm having some fun over at blogissimo, though i have about 12 daily readers. over the weekend i did an interview with fritz hahn, nightlife editor of wapo.com, for dcist.com and i think it turned out pretty well. also over at dcist this morning is a post about a local guy who broke a world record for treadmill marathoning. this has got to be the stupidest thing i have ever heard of. still, it reminded me about running, and that i should give it a shot again, so i registered for the cherry blossom 10 miler in april. you should, too; it's supposed to be a great local race. in case you care, the rest of the weekend was spent with all the usual suspects, getting drunk beyond comprehension while playing trivial pursuit, and spending some good quality time at the meat market that is the clarendon grill.

don't forget that this friday is the holiday party at our hot little apartment! check the evite here. if you haven't RSVPed yet, please do, so we can make sure we have an adequate amount of libation for your drunken holiday experience.

I'm prepared to admit that I'm not the most objective person to comment on this story. I distrust corporations. I download mp3s. I spin elaborate justifications involving copyright extension, artificially induced market scarcity, and utopian internet bullshit. So my reaction to this might be a little more knee-jerk than is warranted.

But does it rub anyone else the wrong way that the movie industry is being allowed into elementary school classrooms in order to train a generation of kids to be more reliable revenue streams? This has got to top even DARE in terms of uselessness and deliberate lying. They have a robot named "Safety Bot" to help teach kids that downloading songs will destroy their computers! Fantastic.

It's tough to conclude a trend from three data points, but between this, the resurgence of the Intelligent Design debate and the recent dust-up over abstinence-only education, it sure feels like we're spending more educational resources than we ought to indoctrinating children to conform with the normative standards of narrow, self-interested constituencies. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but it seems like we'd better figure it out before the SAT includes an essay question about comparing and contrasting brand-name colas.

I don't know if everyone else has seen this, but I forgot to post about it this morning, and I know it gave me a thrill of evil pleasure.

Clay Aiken enlisted a high school choir to support his concert in Jersey. It turns out Clay makes music the same way Kathy Lee makes affordable activewear. Where to begin? The scant and ice-cold meal of McNuggets? The refusal to be photographed with the children? The fake donation to the choir? Or maybe calling the NJ Teacher of the Year "a disgrace"?

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Gawker have the story.

While I'm at it, how about a belated Lost thread? Catherine, Charles and I just watched this week's episode last night. Locke is still awesome, Jack's backstory suddenly seems interesting, and Ethan's downright terrifying.

As to the root of the island's mystery? Charles thinks zombies. Personally, I've wasted too much time in Photoshop to give up on the mechasaurus hypothesis. The latest revision: holographic disguises.

Blogging might be light today -- Catherine's occuppied with her Italian side-project, and I'm swamped at work. Normally I'd bitch and moan about whoever's incompetence caused the current avalanch of bug-fixes, but in this case the blame falls squarely on me. I did a shitty job on this project and now it's time to settle accounts. Fortunately the client is an academic institution -- it's not like they have particularly deep pockets for follow-on work, anyway, so the damage will be limited.

It could be worse, and occasionally has been. My professional low point was probably when my coworkers discovered I had been running Kazaa on one of the company servers from Italy (in order to get some homesickness-alleviating American TV & movies). It was common knowledge that one of my coworkers used P2P constantly on his work desktop, but doing it on the server didn't go over nearly so well -- I almost got fired for that one. Anyone else have some mortifying workplace stories to share?

so, i'm dumb and still italy-obsessed, many moons after my return from the glorious boot. in order to deal with it all, i've created a outlet for my weepy nostalgia and strange fascination with all bizarre things italian. that's right - i now have an oh-so-special italy blog, focusing on all things italian, wine, and berlusconi. i just started it up, so if you think you might be into it, go check it out. it's still in its infancy - lacking a big blogroll and any sort of design - but hopefully it'll grow. and grow. until somebody famous sees it, realizes i am awesome, and pays me to come live in italy, get drunk 24/7 and write about how wonderfully wacky the country is.

via Michael of Articulatory Loop, here's a promising new source of worry for men (in case early death, prostate cancer and the holiday season's ubiquitous jewelry commercials weren't enough): the heat from your laptop may be cooking your testicles. Well, okay, not cooking. But reducing fertility. And while that sounds fine, there's still something disconcerting about the ceaseless howl of my Compaq-brand space heater's fan. And as you can see from the picture below of me at the office, I'm deeply concerned with projecting an image of masculine potency:

(not pictured: ugly green socks)

I think I might need to ask Santa for one of these doohickeys.

Check it out -- from Engadget come instructions on how to replace your iPod's built-in graphics. Cool.

By now, liberal whining about SUVs has transcended mere cliche and taken its place as one of the defining 3 or 4 caricatures most treasured by the world's dittoheads. But as you can probably tell from my writing, I'm not one to shy away from a good cliche.

The DC Council has just voted to establish some new taxes and fees on SUVs in the District. As you might guess, I'm in favor: I think there are externalities associated with SUV ownership -- things like extra pollution and damage to roads -- that should be paid by people who want to own them.

But even if SUV drivers pay their scientifically tabulated fair share, I know I won't be satisfied. Why? Can I just not stand the declasse spectacle of shameless and conspicuous consumption?

Well, yes. But who am I kidding? I'm an American, too. I enjoy consuming barrels and barrels of oil as much as the next guy. I just like doing it more discreetly.

I think the problem is that some of these externalities simply aren't fungible. There's a personal advantage to having more mass surrounding you as you barrel down the highway, or to being higher off of the ground than the losers in cars of conventional height. Unfortunately, the associated disadvantages to those around you are frequently in terms of life & limb. Charging a premium for ludicrously large vehicles and spending the money on road rage prevention is nice, and it's better than nothing, but it doesn't really make it any easier or safer for me to drive except insofar as it subtly discourages SUV purchases -- which I suspect isn't much.

this is late, but i wanted to mention it - on sunday, my father picked me up in d.c. so i could go over to my family's house in vienna to trim the tree, bake cookies, and basically have a norman rockwell christmas sunday, etc etc. we were listening to c-span radio or something as we headed home, and we caught an exchange between george stephanopoulos and bill frist, a man who is a senator and a doctor, and, apparently, an ignorant idiot. CJR campaign desk reminded me today of what was said, in regards to the recent study that revealed the bush adminstration-approved sex-ed programs tell you stuff like touching a girl's boobies will make her pregnant, condoms contain poison that will unleash itself on your penis if you think impure thoughts, etc:

Gerorge: You're a doctor. Do you think tears and sweat can transmit HIV"
Frist: I don't know...I can tell you..
George: You don't know?
Frist; I can tell you things like,like..condoms..
George: You believe that tears and sweat might be able to transmit aids?

at the end, frist admitted that it was incredibly rare for tears and sweat to transmit aids, but he basically had to have it beaten out of him. ridiculous.

Maybe it's just my RSS reader making goofing off more efficient, but it seems like the blog world is a little lethargic lately (including our corner of it, of course). Well, if you want a quick hit of content, check out my cousin Emily's blog. She's a pretty amazing girl having a pretty amazing adventure in Paris. Here's an excerpt, describing half of the young couple she met last weekend and has already moved in with:

Mark is a mime at the Louvre. He gets all painted up and stands on a box all day. Its terrible work, cold and not so lucrative. Oh and he's never been a mime before so he's winging it. He's gotten involved in all this street person drama lately, as the Indians who are dressed up in costumes in the area seem to think they have a monopoly; they are very aggressive towards him, there was even a fight with mark pushing one of them or something like that. But he has the North African Hat vendors on his side.

Kind of beats the shit out of my stories of Italian netcafe intrigue.

God cut from Dark Materials film

The director and screenwriter of the film adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is to remove references to God and the church in the movie.

Chris Weitz, director of About a Boy, said the changes were being made after film studio New Line expressed concern.

The books tell of a battle against the church and a fight to overthrow God.

"They have expressed worry about the possibility of perceived anti-religiosity," Weitz told a His Dark Materials fans' website.

Pullman's trilogy has been attacked by some Christian teachers and by the Catholic press as blasphemy.

Weitz, who admitted he would not be many people's first choice to direct the films, said he regarded the film adaptation as "the most important work of my life".

"In part because it is one of the few books to have changed my life," he told bridgetothestars.net.

The award-winning trilogy - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - tell the story of Oxford girl Lyra Belacqua.

She is drawn into an epic struggle against the Church, which has been carrying out experiments on children in an attempt to remove original sin.

well, i'm excited that christ weitz is directing, which is a fact i didn't know. i think he's pretty good - he handled the adaptation and direction of "about a boy" very gracefully, making it one of the best book-to-movie adaptations that i've seen. even though about a boy obviously a) isn't a trilogy and b) doesn't have the literary heft of "his dark materials," i bet he'll do a good job.

but in order to understand how FUCKING RIDICULOUS it is to cut out any references to church or christianity in "his dark materials"...i'm trying to think of an appropriate analogy. it's like filming "pretty woman" without any references to prostitutes, or "harry potter," except they take out, you know, magic.

apparently pullman, the author, isn't too put out by this change - and i'm sure he expected it:

Weitz said he had visited Pullman, who had told him that the Authority could "represent any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual, whether it be religious, political, totalitarian, fundamentalist, communist, what have you".

He added: "I have no desire to change the nature or intentions of the villains of the piece, but they may appear in more subtle guises."

There are a number of Christian websites which attack the trilogy for their depiction of the church and of God, but Pullman has denied his books are anti-religious.

His agent told the Times newspaper that Pullman was happy with the adaptation so far.

"Of course New Line want to make money, but Mr Weitz is a wonderful director and Philip is very supportive.

"You have to recognise that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush's America."

i guess the film will still be able to properly convey the stories, as long as there's an all-powerful, respected yet totally and terribly evil institution (though i'm not sure why any sort of corporation or other entity would concern themselves with the concept of original sin, which is central to the book), but what the fuck? if people are so worried that their faith, which has been around for, you know, a couple thousand years, is in mortal peril from a movie based on a series of children's books, then that is just plain stupid.

update: bridgetothestars.net suggests that "The impression I have received when I talked to Mr. Weitz was that the anti-religiosity of some aspects of His Dark Materials were being toned down, not removed altogther."

well, i finally did it. i submitted my first graduate school application. i should be whooping it up and hollering that it's one down and two to go, but instead i basically feel like throwing up. now that my application is in their hands and beyond mine, i'm terrified that i utterly fucked it up somehow. what if, in my statement of purpose, i wrote another school's name instead of theirs? what if i wrote utter bullshit? what if my GRE scores never got there and they're never going to tell me they didn't get there until one day before the deadline and then it'll be too late and oh god i'll never get in or have a successful life or have a corner office or be able to afford any more gingerbread lattes and i'm going to die in a cardboard box and now i want my mommy.

whatever. i'm over it.

so anyway, i got the easiest application out of the way - the two remaining schools are big time big deal schools who will never accept me, but i'm going to try valiantly anyway, by george. one of them is almost ready to send off, but i'm having a hard time picking the three writing samples they request. i've got two i've chosen, but the third one is this article i wrote about the italian town of matera (not that blog entry, though) - i like the article on its own, but was wondering if i should try to turn it into a web/photo essay in order to show my internet savvy, y'all. but then, that's a lot of trouble, and the application is due in like a week. soooooo, eh. i don't know.

then the third application doesn't require writing samples, but actually requires me to write a brand new essay. biznatches. here are the topics i have to choose from:

1. One of the distinctive aspects of long-form magazine journalism is that it not only offers the facts of the story but also includes an interpretation of the facts - an interpretation often shaped by the personality, tone and worldview of the individual publication. Choose five of the following magazines to analyze, and then write a one-paragraph description of each one's possible unique take on either "family versus career" or "the events of 9/11/01": The Economist, Essence, Glamour, Maxim, Ms., The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair.

2. Former network correspondent Bernard Goldberg argues in his book Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News that the media are biased in favor of liberal causes and issues. Do you agree with him? Are some media outlets biased in favor of conservative causes and issues? Describe what you would do if your news director, producer or assignment editor tried to steer you in a direction you felt was wrong or unfair when covering controversial issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, gender discrimination or U.S. policy in the Middle East.

3. In January 2002 Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered most judicial proceedings related to the Sept. 11 attacks closed to news reporters on national security grounds. The Justice Department says that Al Qaeda might receive valuable information about the government's investigative methods from public hearings of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Indeed, it is widely believed that news reports about the trial of four men accused of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade towers gave Al Qaeda information that helped it carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. Several news organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union have sued to compel the INS to keep its hearings open to the press and the public, citing the risk to the First Amendment and civil liberties. Do you think the hearings should be open or closed, and why?

now, it's true that i go into unstoppable muscular spasms after reading these topics and realizing that i have to write an excellent, thoughtful 800-word essay on of them. but i think i can handle it. i just can't do number one, because the only magazines i read are US weekly and instyle. and lucky, occasionally. oh, and i can't do number two, because my raging liberalism will shine through, and how can i ever be a journalist if i'm a raging liberal, huh? that NEVER happens. and, um, i can't do number three, because um that's hard and i be dumb and brain cannot answer difficult questions with contemplative, interesting answers.

crap. i am so screwed. can't i just write these schools a statement that says, "please teach me how to get paid to blog"?

Be sure to check out this post over at DailyKos. The Pentagon Defense Science Board's new report shows that we're making Arab opinion of the US worse. Nobody's buying our self-serving democratization rhetoric.

The expected reaction from hawks is that we're not trying to make friends, we're trying to win a war. Well, fine. But if you grant that the threat we face is a function of the hatred felt toward our nation, then our only remedies are elminating the threats militarily, or eliminating the hatred -- it's all a question of where you can most effectively cut the causal chain that ends with dead Americans.

Isn't it clear by now that our military isn't large enough to pacify even Iraq? If the military option isn't really an option, will we ever be able to swallow our pride and pursue a realistic strategy?

(I bet you thought the election had cured us of the preachy political posts.)

One of the great cultural mysteries of the past few years has got to be the Matrix movies. How the Wachowski brothers produce a genre-defining first movie of a trilogy, then turn around and create two debacles that all but erased the achievement of the original film?

Well, here's a potential explanation: they stole the idea. Instead of reclusive geniuses, they're really just navel-gazing, cross-dressing hack thieves. A woman named Sophia Stewart has won a case against the brothers Wachowski, claiming that she submitted a screenplay upon which the Matrix was based to an ad calling for sci-fi scripts placed by the Wachowskis years ago. Here's the most damning paragraph from the article, in case you don't feel like registering with the site:

According to court documentation, an FBI investigation discovered that more than thirty minutes had been edited from the original film, in attempt to avoid penalties for copyright infringement. The investigation also stated that "credible witnesses employed at Warner Brothers came forward, claiming that the executives and lawyers had full knowledge that the work in question did not belong to the Wachowski Brothers." These witnesses claimed to have seen Stewart's original work and that it had been "often used during preparation of the motion pictures." The defendants tried, on several occasions, to have Stewart's case dismissed, without success.

Obviously Larry and Andy aren't without talent -- Bound wasn't bad, and the Matrix movies are impressive technical achievements. But the franchise was clearly unable to live up to the cool premise that made the first movie so much fun -- I find this to be a pretty plausible explanation for why the series' quality fell so quickly.

Oh, and as to why you haven't heard of this case before? Stewart claims it's because Time Warner owns so much of the media. I'm not sure about that -- but on the other hand, if this is true it's a pretty major copyright infringement case, and I can't find any references to it on Google News, despite a lot of online message board discussion about the case.

If news had a smell, today it would reek of ozone and urine-soaked khakis. That's right -- it's time to be terrified of cyberterrorism. DHS has released its report on cybersecurity, including a rough evaluation of the threat posed by cyberterrorism, the looming explosion of cybercrime, and some cyberrecommendations for expanding the cyberbureacracy to cyberfight these menaces. Sorry; cybermenaces.

But before that, we've got former CIA chief Robert Gates warning about the grave threat of cyberterrorism, saying that it could be the most devastating weapon of mass destruction yet. From the AP story:

"When a teenage hacker in the Philippines overnight can wreak $10 billion in damage to the U.S. economy by implanting a virus, imagine what a sophisticated, well-funded effort to attack the computer base of our economy could accomplish"

...

He said the CIA and National Security Agency conducted an exercise six years ago, assigning 50 computer specialists to see how hard it would be to shut down the nation's electric grid. It took only two days for the group to put itself in a position to do so, he said.

"All you have to do is look at what happened in the northeast when you had a tree fall on a line in rural Ohio," he said of a blackout that affected cities from Detroit to New York last year. "What I am talking about is bringing the U.S. economy to its knees."

The first thing to note about all of this is that it's utter bullshit.

i don't normally go out to see movies on their opening nights, but since a) i am maniacally in love with jude law and b) i had a few friends who wanted to see it, we headed out to the gallery place/chinatown theater on friday night to see "closer". there are minor spoilers here and there, so i'll put it behind the cut.

Check out this story. What jerks. Apparently networks are deliberately shifting the start and end times of their shows to confound TiVo users. Networks hate TiVo due to its commercial-skipping powers. By making time-shifters miss the end of their recorded shows the practice is discouraged.

Of course, you can manually extend the recording period by the necessary minute or two, but if you're planning to record NBC at 9 and ABC's 8PM show runs until 9:01, your one-tuner DVR will typically decide there's a conflict and conclude that it's not worth recording any of the NBC show. ABC gains an advantage either way: either time-shifting is discouraged, or its competitors get fucked over. Great job, guys!

It's curious how this innovation has popped up, yet, having had decades to offer additional value to consumers by competitively scheduling their commercial breaks -- that is, not having them simultaneously -- the networks have managed to stay in wonderful synchrony: when one is at commercial, so are all the others. Hmm.

Obviously something has to pay for TV, but I don't think it's going to be commercials for much longer, ill-advised legislation notwithstanding. Networks will increasingly have to turn to subscription fees to support themselves. There won't be a massive switch to an HBO model, but fees paid by cable companies will slowly increase. Some networks will disappear and your cable bill will creep upward. That's a shame, but if it means I can escape a nightly corporate assault on my subconscious it's a tradeoff I'll be happy to make.

In the meantime, I suggest you apply the power of righteous indignation to downloading this week's episode of Lost (click the link, click on 'Lost', then scroll down). Who would have thought that the pregnant girl's backstory episode would be so fascinating and spooky? I liked the show before, but I thought it was going to end up with an unfortunately mundane foundation once the island's mystery was stripped away. Now I'm not so sure. Seriously, go watch it.

A while ago I wrote about Philadelphia's plans to offer citywide wifi access. I argued that data should be thought of as a utility, that it's a natural monopoly, and that it ought to be run by the municipal government. I also said that Philly's plan was doomed, since the city is Comcast's home base. Well, I was wrong. It looks like the city's wifi plans are going forward. And it turns out that Comcast wasn't a jerk about it. Verizon was.

Right before the plan went through, some eleventh hour legislation magically appeared forbidding Pennsylvania towns from offering fee-based broadband access without giving the local phone company the right of first refusal. If the telco decides it'd rather not have the government offering cheap, universal service, it can veto the plan and offer a similar service within 14 months.

Some folks were a little irked by this. The argument goes along the lines of "WHY THE FUCK DO WE NEED VERIZON'S PERMISSION TO BUILD PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE?!" I guess you can argue it's unfair for industry to have to compete with a partially-subsidized civic scheme -- although you'd still have to convince my why I should care. But an entirely subsidized, no-fee service is specifically allowed by the legislation. So I'm at a loss -- why should Pennsylvanians have to ask for Verizon's seal of approval if they want to leverage economies of scale to save some money, attract hi-tech companies and help bridge the digital divide?

Amid the controversy Verizon graciously agreed to waive the right of first refusal they were fighting so hard to get. Hurrah! What great guys. The broadband plan can proceed. And oh, while we're at it, let's just sign that legislation anyway. You know, it's already all drawn up. Might as well. ...That's it. Right on the line here. Great -- thanks! Oh, and FUCK YOU to every other town in Pennsylvania. Verizon's your daddy now.

I don't want to beat up on Verizon -- or at least I don't want to want to. They've consistently stood up on their customers' behalf against the RIAA and its nasty DMCA subpoena factory; plus they don't employ secret bandwidth caps like some of their competitors. But whatever goodwill they've earned with my inner geek, the rabid technosocialist in me bristles at the idea of legislation that halts progress in order to legally enshrine a corporation's imagined right to profit.

i am oh so very ill (*cough* *delicate cough*), but i still managed to write a review of the ted leo show last night. go read it. bitches.

Catherine's going to write up last night's show for DCist later today -- but right now she's still in bed after calling in sick, and I'm free to steal her thunder. So here's a quick review:

Last night offered a good amount of rock for my dollar, although all of the bands seemed capable of better.

Mary Timony started things off. This is the first time I've seen Ms. Timony. I can't say that I walked away a fan. That's not to say the lady is without skill -- she just doesn't play the type of music I like. It's great to use the sorts of keys and scales that only theoretical physicists fully grasp, but I'm the kind of guy who's never understood how "power chord" can be pejorative. I suspect Charles would find a lot of things to like in her guitar work, but I'm too dumb for that; chalk it up to taste, or a lack thereof.

The one criticism I do feel comfortable levelling is that Timony primarily sings at the very bottom of her range. Having read this screed on her website, I suspect Mary feels that midrange singing in a major key is selling out -- and in fact, the only time I remember her doing so was in her closing number. Overall, her sound is somewhere between early Liz Phair, late Fugazi and PJ Harvey with a cold.

Washington Social Club played another great set. These guys are definitely on the rise, having just finished a stint as the house band on Carson Daly's late-night show. The middle of their set is still clogged with so-so songs, but I suspect that's mostly early material that will eventually be replaced. Martin is a talented frontman, and while not universally instrumental prodigies, every band member is a great performer, wringing every drop of rock & roll they can from their instruments. Their CD is worth a listen, too, although a band like this could use somewhat slicker production and a cleaner mix. They've got a few samples up on their website -- have a listen.

Finally, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists went on. Not the best TL show I've seen, but still a great show. The band seemed to be saving themselves to some extent. They're playing 9 shows in 12 days on this tour (including another show at the Black Cat tonight), so I can't say I blame them. Still, the new material is weaker than the stuff from Hearts of Oak, particularly since a lot of Shake the Sheets' political content is already becoming dated. Plus, a lot of his set was fleshed out with material that wasn't from HoO, StS or ToD -- I assume those songs were obscure covers or tracks from Leo's numerous EPs. Perhaps I'm just not sufficiently familiar with those songs, but they didn't grab me the way his best material does.

Still, the guy plays guitar with a frenetic energy that makes it seem like he's just barely able to keep up with his own fingers. And he writes some catchy-ass songs. A so-so Ted Leo show is still a pretty great rock concert.

I'm a few days late noting this, but Josh Marshall is moving to New York, thereby edging out Sally Jenkins for the title of DC's top Big Apple telejournalist.

God dammit, we're a city too! Even if we do only have three rock venues.

Oh well. At least Wonkette still loves us / has a mortgage here.

Don't miss this story in today's Post. It explains the findings of a congressional report on abstinence education programs -- it's simultaneously astounding, hilarious and discouraging.

I've been reading a lot of blog debates about offering "intelligent design" curricula alongside discussions of evolutionary theory. I'm generally pretty averse to that idea, but these abstinence programs make the Creationist lobby look like Richard Feynman. Some sample study material:

One book in the "Choosing Best" series tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess."

december, for me, is both a great and a shitty time of year. it's great because, well, presents! and tiny fat children getting excited about presents, and snow, and explosions of christmas lights everywhere, and starbucks' gingerbread lattes, and layers upon layers of blankets, and baking cookies, and the smell of woodsmoke, and that cold, crisp air, and i could obviously just go on forever. it rocks.

but december can also be a downer of a month - not because of the rampant consumerism, of which i love to partake, or the shitty d.c. weather, or the stress of the holidays and absolutely everything coming to a head, on top of your head. it's the retrospection of december that i abhor. everyone's making long, terrible lists of the best this and the best that; people are regarding the past year as if it's a monster looming in their review mirror, ready to eat them as soon as it's discovered to the full extent of how they've wasted the last 11 months. that analogy really didn't make as much sense as i was hoping it would, but i still look on it fondly. anyway, retrospection sucks, and i generally try to avoid it, because i never end up feeling that good about my deeds and accomplishments in hindsight.

except, that is, for this year! i was drunk one friday night and browsing the archives of the blog (and this sentence alone should reveal enough to you that you would never, ever want to hang out with me), and i came upon a list of my resolutions from december 31, 2003, for the upcoming year. and you know what? i did a lot of them! let's take a look:

-start running again. doing another 1/2 marathon would be awesome. a full marathon may or may not be in the cards. [CHECK! I DID BOTH A FULL AND A HALF MARATHON. AM RUNNING GODDESS. EXCEPT HAVE NOT RUN ONCE IN OVER A MONTH, BECAUSE I AM STILL 'RESTING' FROM OCTOBER MARATHON. AM THINKING THIS EXCUSE IS NO LONGER VALID.]
-continue learning and reading more about politics, foreign relations, and news in general. [EH. I WAS STEAMROLLING ALONG ON THIS ONE, BUT IN THE MONTHS LEADING UP TO THE ELECTION REPUBLICANS PISSED ME OFF SO EFFECTIVELY THAT I DECIDED IGNORACE WAS BLISS. SO WAS ALCOHOLISM.]
-buy more cds [CHECK! EXCEPT, NOT SO MUCH 'BUY' CDS AS LISTEN TO THEM AFTER TOMMY STOLE THEM FROM THE INTERNET. SO I DID INDEED LISTEN TO MANY, MANY NEW CDS, BUT BOUGHT ABOUT, OH, TWO.]
-travel - i want to take trips to boston and san fran, and if there's enough money, plan a trip to see natania in italy. [YUP! WENT TO BOSTON FOR A REUNION WITH MY ITALIAN WIMMIN, AND WENT WITH TOMMY TO ITALY FOR TEN DAYS. AM JETSETTING BIATCH.]
-go out more. bars, happy hour, dancing, whatever. i'm happy staying in on weekdays, but i'm starting to go crazy if nothing happens on weekends [THIS DIDN'T HAPPEN SO MUCH, SEEING AS I WAS RUNNING 10+ MILES ON SATURDAY MORNINGS AT 6AM FOR 5 MONTHS, BUT, HEY, I'M WILLING TO WORK ON BECOMING AN ALCOHOLIC PARTY WOMAN.]
-vote out bush in november [SHUT UP. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.]

so, not bad overall! now i've just got to make a list of relatively easy goals that i will feel triumphant about accomplishing next year! like, "spend more money on shoes and purses," or, "avoid becoming homeless," etc. no, seriously, if i had to formulate my resolution list, it'd look something like this:

-stop biting nails. i have tried and failed to do this almost every year of my life. if you've got a magic trick, please tell me. before i bite my knuckles off.
-take more photographs
-not get tricked into running another marathon because all bad memories of training and running 20 miles and hurting have been somehow erased from memory and "it would be so fun to do it again!"
-stop writing stupid, short blog rants and instead flesh out more stories and interesting content
-throw a big motherfucking bash for my 25th birthday in january
-get into moderately okay journalism school come april
-graduate without humiliating myself from moderately okay journalism school and get a job at online journalism company like the hypothetical one mark glaser describes here
-cook more - not just cookies and pies, which is what i bake all the fucking time, but complete meals
-stop freaking out if things do not go my way, career-wise, life-wise, everything-wise. it'll all be okay.

screw hindsight. i'm thinking to the future, baby!

tommy and i will be at the ted leo/washington social club this fine december evening at the black cat. please join us in drinking bud lite and trying not to embarrass ourselves by dancing unrestrainedly to mr. leo's intoxicating power pop.

god. i can't believe it's december. I HAVE AN APPLICATION DUE IN LIKE TEN DAYS. I AM SO SCREWED.