Author: Aaron Weber

Real Estate Sundays

Every weekend I read the real estate sections in the Globe and the Times and I get vaguely uneasy. Today: people who love sprawl, which is to say, lots and lots of people. Well, they all have bad taste. I guess someone keeps buying those hideous SUVs and driving them everywhere. “Walk everywhere with five kids?” says the interviewee. They have legs, don’t they? Maybe you need a giant stroller. Or a leash. At least it keeps the squalling brats out of my cafes.

Also, yet another article that supports my contention that the real estate market is an unhealthy and ineffecient market. I don’t just mean that the prices are too high, although they are: I mean that the way the market is structured, proper prices can’t be determined. The article suggests that it’s getting better, but I won’t be satisfied for some time yet.

3d Disaster

I made the mistake of playing a few rounds of Unreal Tournament at the AMD/Sun demo stations this week. Now I’m halfway through downloading my kernel sources so I can recompile my kernel to take advantage of the latest ATI 3D drivers just so I can play the demo– I haven’t even had time to get the full version of the game yet.

Argh.

Death by Exposure

LinuxWorld Expo is in Boston this year. I think that might mark a step down for the… well, not venerable exposition. But certainly it’s been around for longer than many other Linux events. It’s certainly smaller this year than last. Last year was smaller than the year before. Conclusion: indicates maturity in the market. Or maybe it’s just not insane anymore, without being actually “mature.” Whatever that means.

At any rate, there were still some funny moments. Intel reception afterwards celebrated their 64-bit Linux software achievements. The theme was ’64. There was a Beatles tribute band. Jello was served and slideshows illustrated Intel scenes from the mid-sixties (pre-bunny-suit technicians soldering transistors and wearing beehive hairdos). Conclusion: nobody at Intel is old enough to remember the sixties.

Also, the KDE booth advertised itself as “The Enterprise Desktop” which makes little-to-no sense, given KDE’s hacker-oriented focus on flexibility and configurability above all else. Conclusion: “Enterprise” is now totally meaningless, except in the context of Star Trek.

Flavour

Oh, in addition to literature, I consumed some of the local products in Belize. Many of them, like the local beer and rum (Traveller’s One Barrel being the finest and of course not available in the US) and fish and chicken, were quite delicious. In the spirit of JBZ’s most recent Tastings review, I offer you the following:

Rendezvous Estates 2004 Chardonnay, Belize. It has been said that anyone can make a decent white wine. After all, you just chill it well and the off flavors disappear. Not so: the flavors of rancid nuts, plastic, and oil permeate this beverage at any temperature, even mixed with soda water or ginger ale. I hope, for the sake of everyone drinking this, that our bottle was just a case of truly disastrous handling, contamination, or heat stroke, but I doubt it.

Mr. P’s Cashew Wine: Cashew Wine is actually made from the cashew apple, the pseudofruit of the cashew tree. Cashews, see, have the fruity outside, then a second layer which is toxic, then the inner nut, which is yummy. The apple can be made into a wine which is just too nasty to drink. But I bought some and tried it. It tastes like a combination of week-old sesame-seed oil, turpentine, and sugar. The really unpardonable factor, however, is that at only 10% alcohol by volume, it can’t justify its off flavors the way cachaza and moonshine do. It’s just plain nasty.

Oryx

On vacation I read:

Too Beautiful for You, by Rod Little. Short stories. Wicked, dirty, nasty, hilarious. Read the first, and if you’re laughing at the end, you’ll like the rest of the book. If it makes you sick, stop there.

Dirty Havana Trilogy, by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Did I say the previous book was dirty? This is, as its title implies, dirty. It’s about this guy who avoids dealing with economic and social and spiritual collapse by having a lot of sex. It’s not porn, I promise.

Best of all, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. I particularly liked that the protagonist is “the words guy” overshadowed by his “numbers guy” friend. The numbers guy becomes a great success and hires the words guy and puts him in charge of advertising and marketing an exciting new product that will reshape humanity. Eventually, everyone dies.

There are brilliant, meditative bits about how and why humanity is being reshaped. But more importantly, there are some brilliant, hilarious bits about the absurdity of the humanity being reshaped. Like where the “words guy” goes to the Martha Graham Academy, which is desperately striving for relevance as a fine-arts or even liberal-arts college, and so adds the motto “Our Students Graduate with Employable Skills” to the original Ars Longa, Vita Brevis. So he studies “Problematics” which includes things like “Applied Rhetoric” and “Relativistics” and goes on to a career in marketing: “The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence, not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses…” Anyway, this is brilliant, brilliant work, and you should read it now.

Back

I’m back from a week in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye (“key”), Belize (formerly British Honduras). Bookdwarf will be posting some pics later. I did not see the native manatee (or dugong), although I did manage to interact with some North American specimens of that shy and quiet sea cow. Details to follow.

Winter Sucks

Today I found an old workout plan. It had me doing 85-pound deadlifts and 60-pound incline presses. Now I’m at 105 on the deadlifts and 90 on the incline press.

I can tell that the gym is less crowded than it was right after New Year’s. Figures: I have a hard time dragging my winter-malaise butt over there myself.

Need. Sunlight.