The one thing about winter...

That I miss is skiing. Skiing was an easy thing in Vermont. You got in the car, drove 30 or 40 minutes, and you were there. I can still ski, of course, not that I've tried in ~15 years, but from Austin, Texas, it's a production. It's like 800 miles, which means you can't just up and go. And you can't just ski once. You have to ski day after day after day to amortize the travel time. Even when I was 14, the first day of skiing for the season would leave me a wreck the next day. There's no way I could go skiing the day after. Now, at my age, with these creaky old bones? Forget about it.

My tentative plan to fix this is to live in Vancouver. Vancouver's pretty cool. We really liked it. There's a ski slope from which you can see downtown. It's no doubt mobbed, but there are two more It's there. Whistler is a 2 hour drive. Maybe it'll be faster after the improvements for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

I have no idea when we could do this. If it was all about skiing, the best time would probably be in around 7-10 years, because the kids would be old enough to enjoy it. The problem then would be getting them out of school. I guess we'd just bite the bullet.

The other tentative plan is to be massively wealthy. That would certainly solve the problem. It's a rather effective solution to a number of things, but I don't know if I should pin my hopes on it.

Bizarre Recommendation at Hollywood Video

 

Austin Christmas

Say what you will about Texas, the Christmas Day weather can't be beat. 70 ° F makes for a pleasant day.

Blame enough to go around in the auto industry

A scathing explanation of how Detroit made its own mess.

Health care reform as stimulus

A quote from the always interesting Marginal Revolution:

Keep in mind that no matter what your view of health care reform, the goal of our next round of health care policy changes should not be to spend as much money on labor costs as quickly as possible.

Mashing avocadoes

Better than a wire whisk at mashing avocadoes is a dough/pastry blender.

A haiku on the last day of fall

Tall trees are lovely,
They shade you in the summer.
Raking is a bitch.

Give a dam

"I don't give a damn" is a corruption of the original phrase. The original referred to a "dam," a coin used in India considered nearly worthless by the English.

One source.

This should make you cringe...

 

... assuming you've ever had the real thing.

What about the individual?

I saw this article a few weeks back about US Major League Baseball teams violating a previous agreement and recruiting Japanese baseball amateurs. The whole article is about the dispute between Japanese baseball officials and MLB officials, and the viability of Japanese baseball. Somehow the article's 1300-odd words managed to avoid any mention of what was best for the players in question. If a Japanese player wants to play in the United States, who are Japan's baseball leagues to stop him? What business is it of theirs? They have a concern about their baseball leagues. Fine. Whatever. Do what you will to keep it alive. But to restrict the freedom of a Japanese citizen? To keep him from finding the best place for him to offer his services? You can't justify taking away the choices of a real person for some nebulous and not particularly important concept like "Japanese baseball." That's just not right.

On the automaker bailout

Save the workers, let the companies die. If people are going to be hurt by the demise of the automakers, help the hurt, don't put the companies on life support. Seems pretty simple to me. Oh, right. Politics.

Blog levels

Software programs often have features for describing what they're doing. The usual term is log. Log messages are generally categorized by what part of the program is writing them. Usually there will also be a time and date. One of the key parts of a logging system is the idea of a log level. That's an indicator of how important the message is. Common log levels might include DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and FATAL. You can tell the program to tell you everything, or to just tell you stuff that's really important. You set a minimum threshold of importance, and then it just reports stuff that's at least that important.

I'm starting to think I want blog levels. Maybe the levels I'd have would be TRIVIAL, SMALL, MEDIUM, BIG, and HUGE. This post would probably be a SMALL. A mildly amusing picture, like the Amazon oops, that would be TRIVIAL. Changing jobs? BIG. New baby? HUGE. And so forth.

You are apparently interested in me. I don't question that; I'm kind of afraid of the answer. Nevertheless, you're probably not interested in every stray thought that crosses my head. You probably don't want to run this weblog on TRIVIAL. I've already got categories. Those aren't quite right, though. You can select the posts in a category, or you can see everything. But there's no way to say "only show things more important than MEDIUM." It's nothing or one or all. So yeah. Blog levels. I want them.

Movie idea

I had an idea last night for a movie. A noted music critic encounters a busker on the street singing incomprehensibly while playing unusual instruments. He promotes him to the wider world. The singer does not appear to understand any language spoken to him. The chorus of speculation eventually reaches consensus that he somehow illegally entered the country, originating from some poorly known region of Central Asia, the Amazon, or some similarly obscure place. Linguists struggle to make sense of his language, and anthropologists are baffled by his novel instrumentation. Through it all, he wanders with apparent dim incomprehension, mute but for the enigmatic verses of his incomprehensible songs. Then we discover he's really an ordinary guy from Ohio who made his own instruments because he couldn't afford the real ones, sang made-up nonsense because he can never remember the words to any songs, and kept his mouth shut because he didn't want to get in trouble.

~ Fin ~

Ice cube trays

Ice cube trays are useful for more than ice. Use them to divide up and freeze big batches of sauces, curry pastes, and (especially) homemade baby foods. Measure the volume of the slots so you know how much is in each. We have one set of ice cube trays that hold a tablespoon in each, and another set that hold a tablespoon and a half. Make a big batch of whatever, fill the trays, freeze, and then shake them out into freezer bags so you can reuse the trays.

Blackfest

I'd like to see (in existence, not in person) a music festival organized along the theme of black. It might feature:

• The Black Angels


• The Black Crowes


• The Black Keys


• The Black Lips


• Black Sabbath


• Blackstreet


• Clint Black


• Frank Black, aka Black Francis

etc.

Free engraving on iPods

I wonder if that's just a clever ploy to reduce the resale market. I'm sure a vast majority of iPod buyers will take the free engraving because why wouldn't you? It's free. Then that iPod is just a little bit harder to sell.

Romesco sauce: before

 

Minus the parsley, which I remembered to add partway through.

The Next Hillary Clinton?

Michelle Obama is 44. Hillary Clinton was 45 when Bill Clinton became President. Both are lawyers. Both were the moneymakers in the family. She's involved in her husband's policy decisions, like Hillary Clinton and unlike, say, Laura Bush. She's intelligent, well-educated, and a strong personality, all of which were true of Hillary Clinton. She's young enough that a potential political career will see many Presidential elections, giving her a number of openings. Hillary was married to "the first black President." Michelle Obama is married to the first black President.

If it's occurred to me, I'm sure it's occurred to them. If that's something she's interested in, look for her to take a role in policy initiatives. It won't be too prominent, but it'll be less fluffy than what Hillary Clinton did, if only because Clinton got dinged for overstating her weak resume as First Lady in the primaries. Potentially, she could spend eight years in the White House rounding out her resume as a liaison, executive, and diplomat. Look for her presence on blue ribbon commissions, humanitarian efforts, and Supreme Court justice nomination teams.

Then she could run for Barack Obama's former Senate seat in Illinois in 2016. His now-resigned term expires in 2010, so the next term would be up for election then. That would be most effective if he gets elected to a second term.

What would be best for her would be a successful 2 terms by her husband, followed by either 2 terms by a Republican or 1 Democratic term and 1 Republican term. In the former case, she wouldn't have to fight the uphill battle against an incumbent. The latter case would be harder. A worse scenario would be having to follow a 2-term Democratic President. Worst of all would be a Democratic President being elected in 2020, as she could not run at all then in 2024. 2028 would still be an option, even 2032, but by then she'd be 68.

If for some reason, Obama loses in 2012, it will harm her prospects, but not fatally. Dick Durbin, the other Senator from Illinois, is up for re-election in 2014, when he'll be 70. Maybe he won't want to run for a fourth term, giving her an opening.

She should aim for 8 years in the Senate like Hillary Clinton; her husband's 4 years before becoming President are a bizarre aberration. That would serve her up to run for President herself in 2024, at the age of 60. 4 or 8 years as an active First Lady followed by 8 or 10 more years as Senator would be more qualification than Barack Obama. If she plays her cards right, and learns from Hillary Clinton's mistakes, she would be a formidable candidate.

A statement of pride

I checked in code my last day. I added a couple minor features, and fixed a critical bug.

Excessively non-judgmental

The NY Times refers to the people who shot up Mumbai as militants. I know the word terrorist has been misused and debased over the years, but it does have a pretty specific definition: someone who uses threats and violence, especially attacks on civilians, to advance a political agenda. If these guys aren't terrorists, I don't know who is. Have some spine, NY Times.