Author: Aaron Weber

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

Loners need a club like the anarchist club needs a president.

I am annoyed when people whine about getting Canadian coins instead of US coins but I do like the idea that people might actually just send me some random cash. Oh please world, send me your Euros so that I can insult the French with them. I’ll be sure to mail them all back to the EU government, honest.

I am very suspicious of branding but I am a sucker for Honda motorcycles.

I’m getting tired of LOTR madness. Even the number of things making fun of LOTR. I mean, really, how much time do we need to spend on this?

A lot, I guess. Helen pointed out that we do in fact need manuals telling us what not to wear, and I guess she’s right. There’s a lot of shows for it too– Queer Eye, What Not to Wear, and Fashion Emergency, just for starters.

There was a condo around the street from my house that I ogled. It had a for-sale sign out front so I called. They said it had sold in under 2 weeks for over 600k. This was a condo, mind you, with basement bedrooms.

QuirkyAlone

I mentioned these earlier. Quirkyalones, aka “single people who think they need some label,” now have a quiz and a movement and a book with promotional tour and shirt. Megan came back from the NEBA conference with the shirt and a pamphlet. The whole thing has pissed her off beyond words. It’s like the periodic how-to-be-a-human-being instructional books. Do single people need a manifesto? You’re just… yourself. Nothing wrong with it. People have done it for quite some time. A movement based on everyone doing different stuff? Is that like a uniform, as they say in Cheech and Chong movies, where nobody has to wear the same thing?

More Reading List

I just finished reading Mystic River. The novel has better detail about Boston, and greater depth of character for the detective character, than the movie. Lehane is mostly known as a genre writer (mystery) but this is a step up– sure, there’s a murder, and a mystery, but the characterization moves it into literary territory.

Next up are the books Megan brought back from the NEBA conference, where she represented theHarvard Bookstore (not that Harvard). As I read them (or fail to) I’ll provide opinions, which I’m sure you’re all just dying to hear.

On food, The Kitchen Detective, by Christopher Kimball (of Cook’s Illustrated), and Are You Really Going to Eat That? Adventures of a Culinary Thrill Seeker by Robb Walsh. I’ve been a big fan of Cook’s Illustrated ever since they ran an article about the gruelling and hazardous search for a perfect creme brulee, which placed their journalists in danger of exploding kitchen torches and exploding coronary arteries, but I’m more intrigued by the one about thrill-seeking. As I read them I’ll let you know.

On politics, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, by Vidal. I don’t much like his fiction, and find his politics shrill, but he’s still an excellent scholar.

I’ve already flipped through The Metrosexual Guide to Style, which is basically the same as Paisley Goes with Nothing and all the other bullshit slightly-humorous how-to guides that explain what your deficient social upbringing failed to teach you. Is it so bad that we need books to teach us that clothes look best when they fit right, that one should not talk with one’s mouth open, and that paying attention to others makes them like us more? Hint: the word “metrosexual,” like the word “quirkyalone,” denotes a marketing demographic turned religion, and anything claiming to champoin it should be avoided.

I like the look of Wild East, a collection of stories by hot new post-Soviet authors. Megan brought advance galley proofs of Waterborne a novel set during the building of the Hoover dam, the new Goya bio by Evan Connell, and a humorous, possibly nonfiction, book called Join Me, about a guy who accidentally starts a cult of some sort. I hear the new Goya bio is great, but I’m probably going to pass on all three of those, although I’m not sure I can articulate my reasons.

Excuses

I’ve been out of town at the Gartner ITExpo. In Orlando. Yes, I saw Mickey. Megan spent Saturday at a book expo. Reading list now contains the new Get Your War On, a sociology book called “Sex in the South,” and a style guide for metrosexuals.

My impressions: Orlando is a vast wasteland. I don’t pretend to understand the economics of expos, but I think that, for the people who attend the talks and sessions, there’s a good reason to be there. Some people worked their way through the Novell booth to collect four stickers and get a prize, then seemed to actually be interested in what I had to say once I began saying it. “Oh, I had no idea you could do that with Linux. And here I was just looking for a free umbrella or baseball cap.” Trade show booths still seem to me like a gigantic display of excess capital that could have better been spent on advertising, cold-calling, or new software development. But I guess that’s why I’m a technical writer, not a CEO.

I feel bad for not posting, because it has become apparent to me that I have an actual readership now, outside people I know personally. Not like I’m in the a-list or anything, but I feel like I let people down when I fail to post for three or four days running.

Weekend

This weekend I put my scooter in the basement for the winter. I put fuel-stabilizer in it so it will run, theoretically, next spring, as long as I keep the battery charged properly.

Before that I spent nearly an hour scootering around Jamaica Plain in the cold and drizzle, trying to find the Boylston Street in JP that isn’t the Boylston Street in the rest of Boston. And I ran into people who knew old friends of mine from school: Orion Kriegman, of Yoism fame, and Jed Stamas, of… well… just fame. I know both from my E-house days in Haverford, although I haven’t seen them since then.

More reviews: Good review of the Kill Bill soundtrack, and a good review of Al Franken’s book, which I find funny and the reviewer found both funny and eye-opening.

Look upon my works

Back in the day, people used to hope their work would make them immortal. Or at least that they would be remembered for generations, or centuries. These days, you know you’re going to be forgotten in ten years, at best.

Places like the Institute for the Future and the Long Bets Foundation are trying to get people to focus on the long term. I’ll be lucky if I can focus on the immediate task before me, namely writing and editing.

I’m particularly proud of this paragraph, from the rug.1 man page:

RUG_ARGS
This environment variable is prepended to any command line
options that are passed to rug and acts as an extra set of argu-
ments. The variable is ignored if the –ignore-env flag is set.
Do not attempt to set the –ignore-env flag in the RUG_ARGS
variable; this is absurd.

Asses and Asinine Behavior

The word of the day is butt call, the accidental calls you get when people sit on their phones and it dials a speed-dial number. The side-effect, of convenience, is the inconvenience of others.

More on unintended consequences, this time with respect to the US war on drugs:
Reason magazine on heroin addiction, (they have a strong libertarian bent, so you know they’re going to be arguing that the drug laws are stupid).
Criticisms and directions on how to fix US drug policy, by some guy named Randy, whom I don’t know much about,.
Note also the previously posted questions for public health students.

Other unintended consequences: intellectual properly policies that are insufficiently clear can leave you open to annoying jokesters. And failing to plan for the extended character sets of non-English languages can leave your software mocked mercilessly by the famous Joel.

Secondhand smoke: hard evidence

Is there any real research to indicate that secondhand smoke is bad? Now there is: Helena Montana had a dramatic drop in heart attacks after banning smoking in bars. Then they dropped the ban, and the heart rate rose again.

The People’s Republik bar, in Cambridge MA, has a chalkboard out front. On the day the Cambridge smoking ban took effect, it read “You can’t smoke in here, but some of us can still stink up the bar.”