You know how I can tell that Geeks treat the world completely differently? FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presents this year’s award to Theo de Raadt. — http://www.fsf.org/news/fsaward2004.html Theo is not a nice guy. He’s called rms “Satan” and probably worse. These two are oil and water. But rms is still giving him his organisation’s biggest award.
Despite increased use, the flu shot hasn’t kept the elderly from dying. Are you surprised? I’m not.
Mardi Gras has come and gone along with the birth of my Lily, so I didn’t get a chance to post this earlier. In order to remind my children of their “culture and heritage” we made king cake using a recipe from Emeril (“Bam!”) Lagasse’s cookbook. This is the third time I’ve made the recipe. Every time I worry that I’ve killed the yeast, but it works out in the end.
I first found Neal Stephenson in 1999 when I read In the Beginning was the Command Line in which he compared operating systems to car dearlerships:
Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them. There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery. [...] One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others. With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.
I saw hints of his cleverness then. It wasn’t till I took up The Baroque Cycle that I began to glimpse at how amazing he truly is with his craft. Still, I wonder. The sheer genius in The Baroque Cycle really feels like it needs a good editor. That, or three times as many books. Stephenson’s genius is his ability to wrangle the baroque details of his 2500+ page saga into a coherent, compeling story. Weaving story lines together and enticing you to struggle on. Of course, his downfall is his compulsive need to tell you all the details he has mastered. Partly, this is because he has done so much research on the period (the late 17th and early 18th century) and partly it is because he is telling you so much about our present world and how modern governance and commerce came to be. It reminds me a lot of the genius of Tolkein: the ability to create and master a world and then convey it to the reader in a compelling fashion. And Stephenson has that down, too: he refuses to be type-cast as an author — he’s gathering fans from outside of science fiction. Finally, Stephenson impresses me as someone who has thought things through thouroughly but hasn’t developed a visceral reaction to anything remotely Christian. See, for example, his take on governance in this Reason interview:
We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t understand the underlying causes. They knew of a few tricks that seemed to work. For example, nailing up plague houses tended to limit the spread of plague. But even the smart doctors tended to fall under the sway of pet theories that were wrong, such as the idea that diseases were caused by imbalanced humors or bad air. Once that happened, they ignored evidence that contradicted their theory. They became so invested in that theory that they treated any new ideas as threats. But from time to time you’d see someone like John Snow, who would point out, “Look, everyone who draws water from Well X is getting cholera.” Then he went and removed the pump handle from Well X and people stopped getting cholera. They still didn’t understand germ theory, but they were getting closer. We can make a loose analogy to the way that people have addressed the problem of power disorders. We don’t really understand them. We know that there are a couple of tricks that seem to help, such as the rule of law and separation of powers. Beyond that, people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions. Wink’s interpretation of the New Testament is that Jesus was not a pacifist milksop but (among other things) was encouraging people to resist the dominant power system of the era, that being the Roman Empire. Mind you, Wink is no fan of violence either, and he devotes a lot of ink to attacking what he calls the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which he sees as a meme by which domination systems are perpetuated. But he is clearly all in favor of people standing up against oppressive power systems of all stripes. Carrying that forward to the present day, Wink takes a general interest in people in various places who are getting the shaft. He develops an empirical science of shaftology, if you will. (Of course he doesn’t call it shaftology; that’s just my name for it.) He goes all over the world and looks at different kinds of people who are obviously getting the shaft, be they blacks in apartheid South Africa, South American peasants, or residents of inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. He looks for connections among all of these situations and in this way develops the idea of domination systems. It’s not germ theory and modern antibiotics, but it is, at the very least, a kind of epidemiology of power disorders. And even people who can’t stomach the religious content of his work might take a few cues from this epidemiological, as opposed to theoretical/ideological, approach.
I’ve only just started the third book.
http://www.julieleung.com/archives/001683.html
Wow! Maps that scroll instead of flickering for reloads. The entire route clearly plotted instead of a dinky, hard-to-read graphic. Pins sticking out of the map with shadows. Of course, there are bugs. Plot a route of, say, 1200 miles. Then do local search for “coffee shops” in “the map below” — a nice feature, eh? Yeah, when all the coffee shops are clustered around the midpoint rather than your entire route.
If you are a klutz, like me, that is. A year ago, I bought a digital camera from BestBuy. Against my better judgement, I let the BestBuy salesguy upsell me the purchase protection plan. About six months later, the kids or I dropped the camera and broke the lens. BestBuy scared up a receipt (yay! for big corporations with centralized databases) and replaced the old Canon with a newer, higher-resolution Fuji FinePix. Now, six months later, the LCD on the camera is busted. This time I have all the receipts. BestBuy replaced the camera, but said if I wanted any more replacements, I’d have to buy a new protection plan. Best 50 bucks I ever spent.
For those not in the know: 
Lily Tuyet (“Snow”), 2005Feb05 3:07pm, 7lbs 5oz, 19.5in Mother and daughter are recovering nicely. Alexis came home about 24 hours after the birth. I’m taking the week off so that I can help her take care of the kid. Violet and I went up to the BestBuy in Reading, PA this morning, arrived back just in time to pick up Basil from school, took those two to the drug store, “napped” for an hour, picked up Ginger, went to the Library, came home to eat, played “Sorry!”, and put them to bed. I expect the rest of the week will be similar: Letting Alexis stay at home with Lily and have a quiet day.
Too bad I couldn’t use Better World Club‘s Bicycle Roadside Assistance to help with my flats. I get too many per year. Surly there isn’t a lot of demand for this. Do they pay tow truck companies to pick up cyclists? Or maybe it is, as Leonard says, another way to stick it to the man.
A while back, I wrote about our move to Lancaster Country and the struggle to find good food and good culture. Of course, every place has its own interesting shiboleths even Lancaster County, but what is more interesting is when you mix cultures. I have a feeling that if we stay in Lancaster too long, our family’s celebration of Mardi Gras will morph into something more Fasnacht-ish — like this Southern/Northern mix:
Personally, I’ve always thought that Fasnacht Day was just proof that even letting go before Lent can be made joyless by Lancaster Countians, but hey, that’s neither here nor there.
Hmm… That site looks like my key into the head of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Still, I may not really need that much insight. Up until I got married to