Still going after all these years.
Big huge congrats to Esta are due:
…no sweat on the admissions. You’re in as of yesterday afternoon. A letter goes in the mail today.
My sister, the seminarian. I’m so proud (sniff).
It’s worth noting, now that we can’t jinx the admission, that she’s continuing in a long tradition of ministry on my mom’s side that goes at least as far back as Benedictus Brackbill, who was born in 1665. No pressure, kid. 🙂
New high water mark at Weblogs.com today. The rate of growth of the blogosphere diameter is now up to more than three blogs a day. Data and updated graphics here.
…that not all hiatuses are permanent. Moxie posted a set of Homeland Security pictograms a few days after going on hiatus:
If radiation is at your door—do not open the door unless you know the radiation personally.
Cheers to Moxie for letting us know she’s still alive and funny, and hope she comes back soon feeling better than ever.
Finally someone put Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies online. Good stuff. It’s easy to see why it wasn’t put online before, though—Gorey’s fine pen art washes into a moiré pattern in the scanner.
No big, painful spills to report. Just a good couple of days on the slopes of Whistler. And some really good food and wine at the Bearfoot Bistro.
The trip up was a little tricky though. It was “wintry mix” when we left Seattle, meaning mostly rain with some hard bits, but by the time we got up past Vancouver and up the “Sea and Sky” Highway, it was real snow. It took an extra hour to get up to the village, and then about forty minutes to find the hotel. And then collapse.
Today we’re recapitulating that in reverse. It took much less time to get down the mountain, which left more time for the “collapse” part.
Skiing is feeling more natural. I did notice a tendency to quote Ryan from Bobbins, though: “I’m a love ninja… on skis! Fwssssh!”
Updated to fix the link, which now actually points to a love ninja on skis reference. Damned copy and paste.
Lisa and I are heading back to Whistler this weekend, and I’m in meetings all day, so don’t expect to hear anything from me until sometime Sunday night. Be good, y’all.
It appears that there’s some contention over where in Philadelphia the first sub sandwich (aka “hoagie”) was invented. Hogwash. It must have been invented in the North End of Boston. Or, erm, New York.
So what brought that on? I was driving back from the UPS depot after picking up a package (grumble grumble signature required grumble) and coming through the oxymoron that is downtown Redmond, when suddenly I realized I wanted a sammich. Not a sandwich, which could have been adequately provided by the cafeteria at work, but a sammich. Something with soul.
Only there aren’t any in the greater Seattle area, particularly Eastside, that I’m familiar with. Quizno’s? Schlotzky’s? Please. Chain sandwiches can never be sammiches, and besides both make me reach for the Alka-Seltzer. Burritos are fine, but they aren’t sammiches. And don’t even get me started on the orthographic abomination that is the “wrapp.”
Surely there must be better alternatives out here. I hope.
In no particular order, great sammiches of all time:
While we were in the garden last Saturday, Lisa noted large holes dug in the back bed, larger than you might expect from a squirrel. “Maybe it’s a cat,” I offered.
“Looks too big to be a cat,” she said grimly.
I thought it was destined to stay a mystery, but Sunday night after dinner with Ed and Gina we were sitting around the dining room table talking. Then Gina said, “Oh, you have a raccoon!” pointing out our skywall into the darkness.
I saw a naked pointed snout and said, “That’s no raccoon. It’s a possum.”
Sure enough, as we watched him, he went into the back bed where the holes were. He was huge, at least a foot tall at the shoulder, and not particularly afraid of the light either. At least until we got a flashlight, at which point he unhurriedly vanished into the bushes.
Unfortunately I didn’t think to get a picture. Sigh. At least now I know what’s been digging in the side lawn.
Dare Obasanjo has published sample C# code and an EXE at the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) for an RSS news aggregator. To my surprise, it does some interesting things like importing OPML subscription lists. It also seems to handle both RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 feeds, and has some neat tricks like browsing directly in the aggregator (why not if you’re embedding IE?).
NetNewsWire it isn’t. In fact, it’s not quite up to Radio’s standards either. There are some definite GUI issues, like not remembering the width of columns and not being able to resize any of the panes in the main window; no delete confirmation for subscriptions; no memory of read items between updates; and calling the “mark all as read” option “Catch Up” (logical, but I was expecting something consistent with all the other email, news, and RSS apps I’ve seen). But it is free, and for all you C# hackers out there it gives good sample code.
Now if only MSDN would add an RSS feed…
Bill Turner at BrilliantCorners points to the DC Subway Blogger Map. I still haven’t seen one for Boston, but of course mapping anything onto the tangled mass that is the Boston T would be tricky. Plus all the college kids would probably have had to choose between locating their blog at their college’s T station or their home one. (For me, that would have been between Kendall on the Red Line and Government Center on the Green.)
And of course we’ll never see a map like that in Seattle, because there’s no subway and the bus system is too boring. Oh well. We still have GeoURL.
Like many a b-schooler, Adam and Jenny are expecting… maybe two. Congrats to the happy couple.
William Gibson points to a Tokyo newspaper article about supposed secret tunnels under Tokyo: “AKIRA-inflected secret city beneath Tokyo; retired construction workers whispering about the diamond-cutter required to tunnel existing concrete, when the maps show nothing but soil should have been there…”
Gibson also notes “subway fantasy is a genre unto itself.” Hard not to be when there’s so much disused or abandoned infrastructure just out of sight, just around the corner. I used to be fascinated by the glimpses of old platforms or entire disused lines you could see in Boston on the Green and Red Lines. There are, as you might imagine, dozens of sites about the phenomenon, including this one on New York and this one on Boston. There’s a master list here.
To point 3, I finally made myself finish Small Pieces Loosely Joined. It’s funny to think that I have some prior art for that book, written in 1993, that talks about how the Internet (which for me consisted of Usenet, IRC, and email) has its own semiotics, where words to signify new identities. Eight years later, after the .com boom bubbled and popped, David Weinberger argues that even the Web is largely a creation of our words, in spite of the efforts of folks like the Audblog people.
I still have hard copies of the issue of the short-lived undergraduate research journal Aleph in which the paper was published, but no soft copies of the paper. I’ll have to dig up the paper and re-key it.
