Moving house

Well, I've signed a lease for an off-campus apartment, so that means I have to move out of the Blogger™ dorm. Why don't you visit me at the new digs?

I'll be keeping some things here at the old place for a while though, until I decide whether to move them into the new place or just toss them away.

Hope to see you soon!

A Judas Priest Fan? Really?

Veiled Conceit finds some info on Supreme Court Nominee John G. Roberts.

They Might Be Giants vs. Flash Animators

The Fingertips Project.

I’m Marcus?!

Great! Dying of unrequited love.... *sniff*

Food science gone mad

I thought an apple which tastes like Concord grapes (seen today at the grocery) sounded interesting — until I found out it was a plain ole Fuji apple with artificial grape flavoring added.

In my defense, I thought it was some sort of exotic fruit with a new label, like kiwifruit.

Borrowing trouble?

Plugging the camera into the USB port, I thought about Plagioclase’s mother. She has terrible arthritis in her hands, and doesn’t have fine motor control anymore — she finds it difficult to push the buttons on the phone, for example.

She was a secretary for many years, and typed on an manual typewriter (she said she never really got the hang of the Selectric).

I thought about the teeny-tiny connector that goes into the camera, and realized that she would never be able to make it go. And then I became a little concerned when I realized that *my* fingers are aching a little this morning.

Keyboard usage >> Arthritic fingers >> Unable to manipulate keyboard

What am I going to do after 50 years of typing for hours every day?

Feed the blog, or feed the blogger?

I’ve been thinking about blogs, blogrolls and RSS (or Atom) feeds. Recently, I changed over Nfaf’s blogroll because it had gotten crufty and because Bill and Son1 challenged me to. Well, not directly. But you know, I took it that way.

Anyway, I realized that I seldom read blogs in their native form. A few I do: the ones that don’t send the pictures along with their feeds, or the ones who refuse to send the whole text of the post (or refuse to do it even on the main page — Language Log, I’m lookin’ at you!). The rest, though, I usually see only in Safari (or Firefox/Sage, depending on my mood).

And so I don’t usually see bloggers’ sidebars — not their “About me!” statements, not their blogrolls, not their Flickr photo-streams, not their Google AdSense ads, not their Amazon Wishlists, and not their PayPal Donate! buttons. I also don’t have to wait for JavaScript, music or graphics to finish downloading.

And I am sooo glad for that.

But if we’re all just reading through syndication, what’s the point of the shilling and excessive bandwidth usage? Why are blogs becoming ever more graphics-intensive — have you looked at some of the WordPress themes? — when people are more likely to only see your text without all of the styles you so carefully designed?

I really do believe that “we’re all reading RSS” — hell, the BBC has feeds for everything for its news site (and gives you permission to rebroadcast it). I am well-known as an early enthusiast but late adopter of technologies — I’m the one who says, “This sounds cool! You try it!” — so if I’m using RSS, then lots of people are.

Is syndication going to be the technology that makes the internet seem less, well, commercial? I doubt it. I’ve already read the term Tagspam to describe the misuse of Technorati tags to promote items unrelated to the subject. No doubt someone will figure a way to get the non-post material into the post so us “eyeballs” can see ’em.

Makes me feel kind of sorry for the folks who don’t use a browser with ad-blocking.

Update: I've just run across an alpha version of a WordPress plugin to automatically include AdSense to your feed. Created by the lead developer of WordPress. Sheesh.

Something I’d like to experience

Barbara Rosenblat reading The Vorkosigan Saga

Forget the words. Here are pictures!

Closeup of Centauria macrocephala flower.


A small stand of bergamot (bee balm).


Close up of an Œnothera (evening primrose) flower. It opens at dark.


Echinacea (coneflower) with friend.

Gardens vs. Gardening

We have only a couple of obsessions here at the Rock Pile, and having a garden is one of them. But as I mentioned earlier, we’re generally not diligent about it. Plagioclase and I love gardens, not gardening. We like interesting plants, native flowers, smelly roses — anything tolerant of a bit of neglect.

I love seeing flowers blooming, and there are some weeds I can do without (burdock and mint being my current banes), but I don’t get out every day and pull weeds out of the flowerbeds — I usually wait until they’re tall enough to be seen to be weeds¹. Our neighbor, on the other hand, is out there every day, arms akimbo, trying to intimidate non-wanted plants into shriveling up.

And every summer she’s watering and weeding and fertilizing and pruning and deadheading…. and we sit and watch her over the crowded blooms in our yard and wonder who has the healthier plants and the more enjoyable vista. After all, we are usually just darned happy that the daylilies and the echinacea and the bergamot and the centauria macrocephala decided to return with little effort on our parts, and we know we didn’t have to do much more than pull a few thistles out before they set seed.

Which, of course, drives P.’s mother crazy. She’s more like our neighbor, often telling us that she “was always taught to…” do something that sounds like makework, in that “I’m invoking external authority here, so it must be right” kind of way. But as her precious plants have been plucked from the brink of certain death², she’s learning that sometimes what she learned by gardening in her brick-like soil doesn’t apply in the near-perfect sandy loam of our yard.

That, and she’s learning to just enjoy sitting and watching our neighbor work… We’ll get her trained to our way yet!




¹ I learned to do this by having pulled out many many “good” plants thinking they were “bad” ones.

² By our moving her garden en masse from her old house to our house. The new owners (of her old house) told us they planned to raze the whole lot.

There’s Soy at the end of that rainbow

Could someone explain this market concept to me?

Listened to an ag-ad for soy biodiesel. The refrain was: “Using soy biodiesel [to farm soy] increases the demand for soy, and helps your profits.”

How could that be? I mean, the farmer raises soy, sells it to a distributor, who sells it to a biodiesel producer, who sells it to the farmer. Wouldn’t increased demand raise the cost of the fuel without raising the farmer’s income from the soy? Soy’s a commodity, so the price probably won’t be affected by an increased demand from say 30 million bushels of soy (equivalent to 30 million gallons of fuel) in a market that produces 2.5 billion bushels annually (that’s just the US in 2002/2003), unless it gets to be incredibly popular.

Farmers aren’t dumb, but perhaps the Ohio Soybean Council is a bit optimisitic?

Food thoughts

I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately, and I’m not sure why. There was an article recently in the New York Times about chefs and the foods they refuse to serve, and someone commented to me today that my father’s conversation (when he deigns to speak) is invariably about food — what he ate and why it was terrible, why isn’t he being fed, don’t forget the snacks.

But while these occurences provide an occasion, they don’t provide the reason for this blog entry. Though who said I need a reason?

I’ve been thinking about tradition; about the time we had barbequed ribs for Easter dinner and tried to convince our Irish guest that it was a tradition in “this part of the country” to do so.

And about preference; about how Plagioclase’s mother and I disagree on what “cooked” means. She prefers everything she eats to be “well-done” — beef, chicken, vegetables, potatoes, salad…. and so sometimes I’ll make or order something to be “rare-rare” just to see if she’ll get that queasy look (soft-boiled eggs are a good bet).

And about snobbery; about how I’m afraid to admit to my foodie friends that I really like boxed mac-and-cheese, and powdered iced tea. No, it’s not the same as home-made (well, as home-made as dried pasta and fancy cheese bought from the deli can be), and it’s not “just as good,” but I like the way it tastes. And after you realize that you overcooked the pudding again and wonder why didn’t you just get the pre-made stuff, since it’s consistent and tastes just fine, and everyone prefers it anyway because it has market-focus-group approval, you’ll learn that it’s ok if you buy some things at the store.

But not the rotisserie chicken. Too salty.