stevengharms

I’ve been in the closet about this for too many years. I was afraid that stating the following would put me into a repressed minority. I feared I would be laughed at by the intelligentsia, I feared that I would be a type of “free-thinker” iconoclast that is vilified by the conservative part of American life.

I suppose I was merely afraid. But I will be afraid no more. Let me say what I’ve known in my heart for oh-so-long.

Doonesbury is simply not funny.

Every time I read it I keep thinking there will be something funny happening. Or perhaps it’s not supposed to be funny ha-ha but rather funny poignant or funny boy-that’s-just-how-it-is. When I read it I think. Hm, that’s pictures with voice balloons.

Yesterday, after a walk around Town Lake, we stopped by Austin Java for a bit of lunch. While I was waiting for my salad and Lauren for her egg burritos, I noticed the Austin-typical amount of people there with books and laptops, no doubt hard at work on materials for their classes.

The guy next to me was working on something in Word. As I watched him fiddle with margins and tab stops, go clicky-click to mutate some words from regular text to bold I realized, again, just how incredibly painful it is to have presentation (bold, left margin of 12, or 30 picas) defined in the same place where you define content ( “When in the course of human events….” ).

That guy should have been focusing on the latter, not the former, yet here he sat, going through pages and pages of content so that he could make it look right. Imagine, had he, in the content left a bit of markup like…

bolditem {text-style: bold}

<span style='bolditem'>we must remember our friends properly</span>: their lives merit more than mere sentimentality

And then later if he decided ‘bolditem’ should get changed, a quick search and replace to change ‘bolditem’ ( a most unlikely word to type in your content ), to ‘italitem’ and then change the styling definition to italitem {text-style: italic} or red, or green, whatever, it would have taken but mere seconds.

Instead he was trolling through a document glumly selecting text, hitting the bold b button, and then selecting more text.

This design method is simply so wrong.

But this has been said elsewhere far more eloquently…

Ladies and gentlemen, let us discuss a truth.

There are times in life, when a person needs a beer after work.

It’s not my usual practice to drink very much. Sure the occasional glass of wine with pasta, or a ‘rita on the rocks with a fine mexican meal, or a Negra modelo with queso, but alcohol, on the whole, doesn’t find a daily involvement in my life. Although, by the previous sentence, if I ate a diet of “fine mexican meals”, pasta, or queso exclusively, it might just, but I digress.

With Lauren working until later in the evening, and me having too many hours to kill until she got home, the prospects for the early evening were go home (crickets) and surf websites or write code ( something I’d done enough of yesterday, thankyouverymuch ), watch DVDs, and I’d missed my yoga class. The weight of continued wranglings with my new LDAP infrastructure were heavy upon these shoulders and as 80’s era McDonalds used to say: I deserved a break today.

So I decided that it was a good opportunity to find a beer and a jukebox. I had received a ‘calendar reminder’ that Rosie Flores was playing the Little Longhorn saloon on Burnet, so I decided to go, have some bar food and a beer or two, and catch Rosie’s show. I arrived in the early evening and had a Shiner, some Fritos, and watched the Simpsons and Seinfeld power-hour ( some things about Austin’s TV programming never change ) and waited for the show to get on the road. Game 7 of the NLCS was on so the time flew by until the arrival of Rosie and her band. Local area musician Dale Watson even stopped by while I was waiting, i was hoping he’d hang around and do a bit of playing with the band that night, but, he left - alas!

The show was phenomenal. Rosie sings a honky-tonk, rockabilly style, with some espanol overtones mixed in - it’s just great! She came in, thin and leopard-print-panted, and pulled out a baby-blue, hollow-body Epiphone whose paint would not have seemed out of place on a ‘57 Chevrolet. With the music underway I sent Lauren a rapid fire series of text messages instructing her on how to navigate to the saloon.

Lauren arrived for the inter-set gap and we grabbed a small table. The 2nd set opened up with a trio of Elvis covers which included a bi-lingual love me tender, rendered both in English and in Espanol. Those 50’s crooners’ songs really translate well to Spanish ( See: “Llorando” from the Mulholland Drive soundtrack).

Rosie’s got a great stage presence, working with the crowd as she rocks away, fingers working bar cords up and down the neighbourhood between the 5th fret and the 10th. She’s got a great smile, a great spark, and the show was tons of fun. She tells stories about the old days of country music, before Hollywood Nashville got too big for its britches. She had a great song about LA’s legendary Palomino Club ( which closed in 1995, not to be confused with any burlesque houses in Las Vegas ).

Lauren and I ducked out about halfway through the second set after dropping some green in the tip bucket to grab some breakfast food over at Kerbey Lane before we headed home. Rosie thanked us for coming out in-between the verses and all was right as we wandered out into the rapidly winterizing Austin night.

Next time I go down for Rosie night I’ll have to invite my sister and / or The League.

When we were still living in Mountain View, I would often watch Dwell magazine on TV on the Fine Living channel. I was consistently surprised by how many modern homes were being built in Austin and the surrounding area.

It’s funny where modern design pops up, while I wasn’t surprised to hear about the Annie House conversion in South Austin, the other day Lauren and I had a run-in with modern design quite by accident.

We had gone to La Feria on South Lamar for dinner and afterwards drove through a neighborhood that I had never visited before. Ok, in truth, I thought that the road would go through and be a shortcut back home, which it was not.

We came across a very modern, and very interesting Episcopal church, St. Mark’s, which was built in a very modern way, but which also embraced the Texas landscape and let it’s deep, broad, blue sky and fierce, golden light act as the architectural enhancers they were meant to be. Check out the architects’ portfolio’s pictures of the site (for all that good architectural design, I might have suggested they look into the HTML “named anchor” so that I could link directly to the church mumble).

I checked out the architects, Jackson and McElhaney and they have done a number of commercial and residential properties that embrace the modern, the open, and the native flora and vistas of the area.

Beautiful work guys. If I ever get the scratch together I’d love to take a meeting with them.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

print "aww\n"

Cuteness

“The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” — Edward Gibbon

Well, as mentioned previously I’ve begun my sojourn to the Old World. This morning my awesome girlfriend took me to SFO at 0430. We got to the airport fairly quickly and check-in was uneventful. The only real bummer was that I realized that I had left my excellent Christmas present from Elle, a great coat, in the backseat of the car and that it was too late to do anything about getting it back. So, I’m a bit worried about the weather and my attire but I’ve heard rumors about a fashion industry being centered in Rome, so I’m sure I’ll find some way to go.

I have a long history of buying leather goods in Europe.

To the meat of this post, I’m flying with Delta’s codeshare partner “Song” airlines which is a product of the battle for low-cost carriers. This is a real hoot. Much as Southwest changed the standard of service, design, and, uh, ambiance in the 70’s and 80’s by putting the T&A in sTewArdass, Song seems to be putting the “Way Westerners like to think about Asians” into the air. To prove my point, the lavatories have wooden laminant floors in them - to keep beneficial feng shui

First things first, the airplane’s color scheme would not be far off from being acceptable at a dot-com: magenta, green, orange, and blue on the leather seats. I wouldn’t say that the seats had any extra legroom or rump-room (surely to be a problem in the future if current social trends continue). Nevertheless I found the furnishings to be nice, complete, and adequate.

The opening safety spiel was done by a peaceful monotone voice that was very similar to a guided meditation, or a yoga teacher’s narration. It asked us to visualize a relaxed takeoff and to raise our hand “gently, ever so gently” if you are unable to complete the funkyfoo associated with being in the meergency exit row.

Each seat also has its own in-headset screen that can be used to order up on-demand programming. There are movies (“The Constant Gardner” or “Historp of Violence”, “40 Year-Old Virgin” being on the movie channel), on-demand playlists that can be selected from a cache of mp3s, etc. On the whole, there are many multimedia opportunities that can be enjoyed while being seated.

Only thing they’re missing in cattle class is laptop A/C power.

I’d also like to add that the staff seems to be a bit younger and hipper. There’s not so much the “First-Class New York to Paris” high class thing (yes that was taken from the abysmal Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle (tee-hee), “View From the Top” which I saw, uh, on an airplane).

I think an interesting development of the airlines effectively getting out of the hospitality business is that more and more people are taking all of the hospitality elements into their own hands. I sit here with my portable music, portable DVD. I don’t count on getting anything decent to eat on the plane, so i take care of that before I leave. I have my own superior head-rest and warmth materials. I suppose, at that point, the airline is nothing more than a glorified people-shipper.

I was also wandering about the cabin on the way to the bathroom and I saw my favorite old-school window manager ‘twm’ running the ‘ash’ shell. I take it that this is the system that’s used to upload all the movies and music when the plane comes back home. I was pretty interested to find out more about this OS, what it runs on, and what it’s been optimized for. Here’s a pic:

The OS is called BusyBox and is a stripped down Linux variant.

I’ve never taken Jet Blue, but I think that the experience must be similar. I’ve really enjoyed my trip on this airline and would definitely recommend it as a better way for moving about domestically, if you’re so inclined.

Oooh, I’m over Michigan now, home to fine Michiganders of all ilk and size.

Big Mac, God sculpted your face so that you could play Michael Score of Flock of Seagulls in the movie version of 1984 musical history.

• Greek Myth
• Cool glyphs - none better than cuneiform or Greek
• A quest against the gods
• An existential dilemma
• Pseudo (or actual) Latin chanting background music (? la Orff’s Carmina Burana)
• Great scenery and backgrounds
• Mysterious Oracles who say mysterious stuff

Extra bonus: Get great voice talent like SF icon and host of City Arts & Lectures, Linda Hunt, to do the role of the wizened narrator.

In short, God of War.

This game is, may I lapse in to gamer, T3H r00lz!!!111!!!.

You play Kratos - a very wan man in search of vengeance - seeking the death of Ares.

Digression:

Can Gods die? The Greeks had a very complicated relationship with this question. Furthermore, when belief dies is that not what truly kills a god? Furthermore there’s a great thematic resonance to the classic Harryhausen flick Jason and the Argonauts when Jason says [ something like ] Some day men will be better off when they learn to have nothing to do with the Olympian Gods. Interestingly one of the godesses asks Zeus why he doesn’t strike Jason dead for that remark but Zeus seems oddly at peace with the idea that his utility was finite. )

un-Digression

In your purusuit you swing these very cool blade weapons (“The Blades of Chaos”) and give many-a monster (Centaurs, Minotaurs, Sirens, and other beasts) a one-way ticket across the river Styx.

Let me re-iterate, T3H r00lz!!!111!!!.

I finished Lynn Truss’s (that apostrophe there was discussed in the text - apparently that’s the correct way of doing it these days) book today (Buy Here). It’s a book about punctuation for pedantic people who know they’re being pedantic.

This book reminds me a lot of Anne Fadiman’s book Ex Libris (Buy Here).

I decided that I would like to keep a better handle on all the books I read in a given year so I decided I would start a Book Journal. I bought the journal at Mountain View’s East / West bookstore and proceeded to go to town.

Based on the content of Truss’s book I produced the following outline of punctuation points I always have trouble with (link forthcoming). I always had (have) such issues with that pesky comma!

The really interesting bit was that while at Dana Street a troupe of amateur belly dancers showed up. It was a real hoot and completely unexpected.