Octopodial Chrome

I just saw Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Long Engagement), an excellent French film about a young woman trying to find her fiance—supposedly slain in the Great War. It’s a top-notch film; if your eyes are able to read the subtitles in the final scene then you have a lump of ice where your heart should be.

The Royal Society has released its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings since 1665 online. Want to read Newton or Priestley in the original? They’re there. They are free until December, so archive as many as you can.

Here’s the Complete List of Pirate Laws for your reading enjoyment. Just remember: a pirate does not use the word Fabulous. Ever.

This article on pirate radio is great: when FCC agents raided radio free Santa Cruz, several hundred protesters gathered, including the city’s mayor. The FCC agents’ cars had their tyres slashed and then the police gave them parking tickets. Grass roots government at its finest.

Well, after decades of faithful service the F-14 Tomcat retires today. These are the planes made famous in Top Gun; they were one component in the shield which defended us from the now-defunct Soviet Union and prevented World War III. And now they’re fading into the sunset.

I want a little hobbit cottage like this.

I just got back from seeing Top Gun on the largest screen in all Denver. It was incredible to see again in a theatre—well worth the princely sum of $5 a ticket. I highly recommend it, should you get the chance.

So I watched Batman, for probably the first time I a decade and a half. Back in ’89 when it came out my father heard something on the radio about—unfortunately he mis-heard DC (as in DC Comics) as Disney and thus he took his family to see a Tim Burton film.

At the time, I thought that was about the coolest thing ever. My parents would normally have never allowed us to see anything like that, and I’d have been the laughingstock (as usual) of the kids at school. But instead I was one of the guys, for a brief moment. It was pretty sweet.

Seeing it now, though, I have to admit that it is bewildering why any sequels were made. It’s just not a very good film: too juvenile for adults; too adult for children. It’s not at all believable; in fact, it’s really a stupid film.

On the way home after church on Sunday I stopped off at my local homebrew shop to pick up the ingredients for a Scotch Ale. The folks next to me at the grain mills were a nice young couple looking about college age or slightly older. I ended up in line behind them, and as we were chatting (the store was busier than anyone had ever seen, so there was plenty of time for talk) it turned out that they’d never done an all grain batch before. I and the fellows behind me noted with some surprise that they were about to buy around nine pounds of barley and no extract.

Those of y’all who’ve never brewed before (poor souls!) probably don’t know that there are different levels of brewing one can do. Most folks start out with hopped extracts; these are barley syrups with hops already added—the brewer simply mixes with water, boils and adds some yeast. The next step up is to use unhopped extracts and add hops of one’s choosing. The step after that is to steep ground barley (or other grains) in warm water to extract some desired flavour, then to add extract and hops. This is where a lot of folks end up stopping for awhile, as it requires no extra equipment and is fairly simple. It’s relatively expensive, though (extract isn’t cheap to produce or transport) and doesn’t give one very good control over the final beer.

The most advanced sort of brewing (and that done by almost all commercial breweries) is all-grain brewing. One takes ground grains and mashes & lauters them. Mashing is the process which converts the starches in grain into sugars; lautering is the process of straining the sweet sugar water from the spent grains. Both of these steps require a certain amount of skill and special equipment. One has to calculate the right amount & temperature of water to add in order to raise the grain to a temperature where the right enzymes can go to work and one has to lauter the mash so that the wort is relatively clear.

In effect, this couple was going from buying freeze-dried coffee to green coffee beans—and they didn’t realise it! Fortunately, it’s not that difficult a process, but to leap into unsuspectingly is…mind-boggling. We did our best to give them a brief overview of the process and point them to some good resources and I hope that they were successful, but I fear that they might have had one rotten Sunday evening.

Seen on the profile of bookstopshere, a LibraryThing user with whom I share a number of books:

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again… The truth is that in the end, the size of a library does matter. We lay the books out for inspection like a huge exposed brain, offering miserable excuses and feigned modesty… There is a moment, however, when we have accumulated so many books that they cross an invisible line, and what was once a sense of pride becomes a burden, because from now on space will always be a problem.

Carlos Maria Dominguez, The House of Paper

Very true. Don Aslett once pointed out that books are really clutter, read a few times but taking up space forever. What he failed to note is that books reveal who someone is. Also, a smoking room unlined in books is hardly a smoking room at all.

Well, I’ve gotten all but one of my bookcases into my LibraryThing book catalogue—435 books so far. I’ve one bookcase, several boxes and a few loose books and I’ll have a complete list of all the books I own (and so will anyone who visits my LibraryThing profile. It gives a pretty good idea of who I am & what I’m interested in.

Well, I left my Common Lisp blogging software project lie for long enough; about a fortnight ago I started working on it again. It’s now in a workable condition, and is faster than my current blogging software. I have two more plugins to finish porting and then I’ll be able to convert Octopodial Chrome over to it. How cool will that be—running my blog on my own hand-written blogging tool.

Today I learnt about something I’d never heard of: the springhouse (sometimes written with two words, as spring house, others with one). It’s a small structure you build—generally of stone—over and around a spring. At its simplest, it just fills a cistern and keeps it in the dark so that algæ doesn’t grow. But it can also be used to fill a trough running the perimeter of the building; the cold spring water constantly running up from the spring, around the room and out of the springhouse yields a constantly cool room; a low-tech refrigerator. If you’re lucky you can even use the coolness to chill another room where you can work during the summer.

If I ever buy a piece of land, I think it definitely needs to have a spring. I’d love to build a springhouse.

Dr. Ian Walker conducted an experiment which showed that drivers are twice as likely to pass too close when a cyclist wears a helmet—at an average separation of 3¼ inches. The theory is that perhaps they consider helmeted cyclists to be more predictable. Or perhaps they are less afraid of hurting someone wearing protective gear. The researcher was struck twice, both times whilst wearing a helmet, out of 2,500 passes.

Yet more evidence that helmets can be bad for your health.

Almost a century ago Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii developed a colour photography technique and travelled throughout Russia taking pictures. Now, there are some pictures of the same places 94 years later. It’s interesting to see how little certain things can change.

Found this great bit of advice from a guy in his fifties to a guy in his twenties. If this doesn’t make you laugh, you have no soul.

What if Noam Chomsky & Howard Zinn provided a commentary track for The Fellowship of the Ring? You can really imagine them blathering on like this…

A fortnight ago I’d a spill on my ride in to work. While making a right turn my rear tyre went out from underneath me, and I discovered that it’s very difficult to ride a unicycle when one’s a few feet behind, rather than above, it. I went sprawling and my glasses, hat and backpack went flying (how does a backpack come off of both arms?). It was the worst accident I’ve ever had: banged up my left knee, right thigh, right elbow, right ribs, and both hands & palms.

I’ve not ridden my bike since the parking lot of the bike store after it was supposedly fixed (the mechanic believed it was due to loose cranks, but I just don’t see it). To be honest, I’m rather afraid of riding thing. One of these days, maybe, but for now I’m happy walking.

Two police officers were killed and one wounded whilst on a charity bike ride. A truck struck the van alongside, which then struck them. Considering that it’s a four-lane highway, it’s hard to imagine any justification for truck driver to have hit the van, which was prominently marked Caution Cyclists Ahead. Ironically, the ride was meant to raise money for the families of officers killed in the line of duty.

Fr. Aris Metrakos has an article about American Orthodoxy and both its positives and negatives. Interestingly, Fr. was a naval aviator before attending seminary and receiving Holy Orders.

Google offer a searchable database of products, services and so forth; I’ve submitted my books in a bid to see if they make any money. The books are:

G.K. Chesterton

Alarms & Discursions

What’s Wrong with the World

Christopher Morley

Shandygaff

Booth Tarkington

Penrod (hardcover)

Penrod (softcover)

We’ll see if they sell or not. It’d be kinda cool if they did.

Apparently Steve Irwin died from a ray’s sting off the coast of Australia. What an ignominious end!

I just ran across Craig Finseth’s book The Craft of Text Editing. It’s a kind to implementing a text editor, given the knowledge current as of 1991 (which, sadly, hasn’t progressed a bit—the old text editors are in many cases far more advanced than the modern ones). An essential read if you’re looking to write an emacs-like editor.

Psychology Today has an article about how we’ve become a nation of wimps due to parents who obsess over making life as easy for their children as possible. Cellphones don’t help, either. Read on so that your children will be among the few to actually grow up when they grow up.

Today was my last day at Nissan, after a little more than a year there. I don’t feel nearly as sad as when I left the CoBank account, but it’s still the end of something fun.

Yesterday I bid a final farewell to Tom Tripp. He interviewed me for an internship position at IBM—at CoBank—way back in the summer of ’98; I got the job and we’ve been working together for eight years. He’s a fine man, one whom I’ve been fortunate to call a co-worker and a friend; I count myself lucky to have known him.

Now I’m on to the American Express account. It should be a great challenge!