Category: Things

Doc Sharp has upgraded my MT for me, booya.

Maybe he should run the T, and we’d get upgrades in transit. What kind of transit service decides that, despite growth in population and pollution, we need no more train service? Yeah, OK, we’re short on cash this year. Let’s plan for expansion. Let’s plan for savings. Let’s automate anything we can. Public transit gets no respect.

My parents say I should channel my anger into political change. Odd, I was under the impression that generally didn’t work.

At one this afternoon I was at the Boston Book Fair and also the print fair, where Megan and I looked at, for example, an eleven-thousand dollar first edition of Dune. We got a 19th century print from Japan, but it was, let’s say, in the three-figure range. Closer to the two-figure range.

Then, on to The New England Motorcycle Expo, which had a decidedly different tone. As in, The New Jersey Bikini Team was there. I got to sit on a twelve thousand dollar motorcycle. They didn’t let me sit on the twelve thousand dollar copy of “Valley of the Dolls,” I’ll tell you that much.

Plus, the lemonade stand at the book fair had a sign about not going near books with lemonade, whereas the lemondade stand at the motorcycle fair had a sign about how for two dollars extra you could have your lemonade with vodka in it.

First: yes, I fixed my RSS feed so it shows the whole post. I had cut it down while I was syndicated on Planet N, because I was SO off topic for that feed. But eventually I decided I should just be off that page generally since I’m so off-topic.

And here are two links about why I think our current government should have been voted out: Our stupid trade policy and our even stupider security policy.

Great interview with Mary Roach, author of the book Stiff, which is giggle-inducing and enlightening at once. I love the part in the chapter on decomposition where she decides that “maggot” is an ugly word and that for the remainder of the section we will use “hacienda,” which sounds much nicer, to describe larval flies in dead people.

McSweeney’s reconsiders famous films. I like the one on Babe.

Everyone needs to read Ron Suskind’s latest article on Bush. I quote:

[While discussing who would act as a nonpartisan peacekeeper in Gaza, it was mentioned that] Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. [Senator Tom] Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

”I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. ”They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ”Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ”No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

Or, later, Suskind’s meeting with a senior official:

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Now, I prefer fact-based leadership to blind guessing, but hey, take your pick. You are, after all, as certain as I. The difference is that I am right, because I have relied on facts, and you are wrong, because you have gone with a hunch. But hey, certainty is what matters, right?

I bought a half-bushel of apples this weekend, and brought quite a few in to the office for snacks for everyone. During a break in a planning meeting today I mentioned it, and Ted, jokingly, asked, how many pecks are in a bushel? I said, four, more or less reflexively, sort of guessing. He was startled.

I was right. Two gallons in a peck, four pecks in a bushel. The actual volume of a gallon, peck, or bushel varies by nation (UK gallons are slightly larger, so although 2 UK gallons still make a UK peck, it’s not the same as a US peck.) This is why we have the metric system.

The City of Boston has an organization called One in 3, dedicated to reaching out to the third of the city’s population between the ages of twenty and thirty-four. (Trivia: Ten percent of the city’s population, and 30% of the 20-34 age group, lives in Allston/Brighton). I get their newsletter.

As you might guess, the primary issue for people this age is the primary issue for most of the city: housing. After getting an email newsletter from One in 3, I wrote to the Boston Redevelopment Authority asking how I could get involved in the housing development process. They said I could join an Impact Assessment Group– provided that I lived in Boston in the neighborhood impacted by a particular development.

Fair enough, except that everything they do is geared strictly to people living strictly within the city limits of Boston, rather than people living within spitting distance of Boston. This too is obvious, but it’s also obvioiusly stupid.

Why should Boston have different laws from Cambridge, West Roxbury, and Arlington? It makes little or no sense. We need consistency within the greater Boston metro area. It would help a hell of a lot.

You want to solve the housing problem in this area? Not badly enough, obviously. Here’s my simple plan:

• The City of Boston should annex all land inside Route 128, or state should impose mandatory zoning reconciliation for the entire area. No matter how it is achieved, the permitting and building process should be identical for the entire area.
• All universities should be required to provide a bed for all students who don’t already live in the area.
• All new residential construction greater than, say, 3000 square feet should be required to have a rentable apartment as part of it.
• Currently, simpler regulations apply to 3-family and fewer buildings than to larger apartment or condo complexes. This should be expanded to four or five.
• Most new residential development should be encouraged to be at least one story higher. Most height restrictions on residential construction should be eased.
• Subsidies for reuse of historic or industrial buildings should be increased, especially for environmental remediation. They can pay for this by increasing the cost of parking permits.
• The subway should be extended: Red line should run out through Arlington, Blue line to Billerica, Green line E train out to the blue line somewhere, Green line Lechmere should be extended to Davis square, with a free transfer at Davis. The “Indigo” or “Circle” line should be constructed, even if it’s just with buses and a dedicated lane. They can pay for this by doubling fares. Double fare will also pay for extra subsidies on discounted T passes for the poor.
• All independent for-pay surface-level parking lots in the city should be fined or taxed out of existence. Turn that land into a (min. 4 story) parking garage or develop it in some sane way. Don’t waste it like that. Municipal parking lots should be converted to municipal parking garages where possible. Ideally, two lots could be replaced by a garage over the location of one, and then the other could be sold to housing developers. Money for the city, housing for the people.

Any of these would help. All of them would be political suicide. What we need is a supervillan or someone with mind control rays. That’ll solve the problem!

OK, here’s a bunch of random stuff for the weekend:
The papernapkin.net rejection service: make up an email address ending in papernapkin.net and give it to someone you don’t want to hear from. Paper Napkin will tell them to go away, so you don’t have to.
The Week in Craig sorts through Craig’s List and looks for the weird, funny stuff, so you don’t have to.
The Nerve Pickup Line Contest chooses the best pickup lines, so you don’t have to figure them out for yourself the hard way.
Blast Off is a great political blog with a great transcript of an obviously deranged person calling a political talk show. Some items are serious, and some are not. Like the one about how you just have to giggle a little bit when a frozen-foods executive is found dead in a freezer.

Rightists in and outside of the party claim Kerry is an “out of touch ultraliberal from Taxachussets.” Facts: Massachussets is actually about 26th in overall tax burden, right in the middle. Housing is expensive and that makes property taxes burdensome, but the fact is, “Taxachussets” is a big lie.

While we’re at it, have I mentioned that Dennis Hastert may be a pedophile cultist? We don’t know that he isn’t, anyway. He has never discussed membership in a child-molesting cult, nor has he disavowed the molestation of children and attendance of cult rituals involving human sacrifice and the Reverend Moon.

We can’t prove that he’s not a serial killer, but we do have very strong evidence that he is a lying sack of shit and that he is also the Speaker of the House. Oh, and he’s fat and ugly. So there.

(Why do people make fun of Michael Moore’s looks, anyway? I mean, he won’t win any beauty pageants, but he’s not exactly running in any either– he’s a filmmaker, not a model. His weight isn’t the issue.)

The relatively simple perl script mencal is not a very useful application: it basically displays a text-based calendar and highlights several days each month. That’s OK, I guess, but it’s not what I would expect from a real app. A period can vary in date and duration, and your predictions may be more or less accurate, so it really needs more flexibility. Also a GUI display would make it easier to use. A good mensturation application would have the following features:

• Integrate with Evolution for information display. Ideally implementation would be an EPlugin, but it could be a separate app that exported an icalendar file.
• Display predicted and actual menstruation dates separately.
• Improve its prediction algorithym as it is corrected by the user.
• Display days of ovulation, estimated maximum and minimum fertility and other hormonal events. Display of these events should be customizable.
• Export graphs of estimated hormone levels and fertility events.

I’d suggest that it be written in C# with Mono, like all the cool apps are these days. Besides, Evolution has great C# bindings.

That would be an app worth shipping!