Episode II Teaser

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It's available at the Star Wars website.
I saw it ahead of Monsters Inc. this weekend. What's funny is that last year some fans made a mock Episode II trailer that was nearly as good as this one. Just a series of slide shots and closeups on turning heads.
Apple is forcing everyone to upgrade to Quicktime Pro to see the large versions of trailers, or to save them to their computers. I think they're seriously misjudging the value proposition. $30?
The animation in Monsters Inc. is impressive. There's a scene in the snow when Sully is flying down a dark mountain on a sled, with a small lantern hanging on the sled. The lighting in that scene must have been really difficult, and it looks fantastic. Then his sled blows up and they show him lying in the snow, and you can see the hairs on his body blowing in the wind. The movement is completely natural. And whereas they still don't quite capture the movements of older humans all that well, the cartoon-like movements of a very young child like Boo come out very nicely. The facial expressions on the kid who watches Mike do his comedy routine are also very good.
Oh, and the chase scene is a lot of fun. It's something that the world of digital effects has opened up for us, the world which would cost too much to build as a physical set. Doors flying everywhere. That would make a great rollercoaster at Disney, if they could build a giant warehouse that large and that deep.
The humor felt a bit flat to me. Definitely more geared towards kids. It's a film that doesn't soar the way Toy Story or Toy Story 2 did, but the ending is wonderful. Classy touch.

Yessss!!!!! Folks have just left.

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Yessss!!!!!


Folks have just left. Sang and I had people over to watch
Game Seven. What a series!
As soon as Grace lined that single up the middle off Rivera
to lead off the ninth inning, Adam shouted, "Rock, you've cut
him! He's bleeding! He's human!" Bittersweet since he's
an ex-Cub, but I'm glad he got the chance to play in a
World Series, and he came up big, 3-4, today.
It was awesome to see Curt Schilling dragging himself out
there for eight innings. His splitter was clearly not sinking the
way he wanted it to at the end of the game, but he was a
gamer. And then Randy Johnson. What a stud. After throwing
over one hundred pitches the night before, dragging himself
out there for 1.3 innings of relief. His arm must have felt like
a brick, and his fastball clearly lacked the usual zip, but he
just found a way to shut down the Yankees. Those two
clearly deserve the co-MVP. Those two left their arms
out on the mound.
Tony Womack, much maligned by rotisserie baseball players
everywhere for his lousy on-base-percentage, showed
that anyone can be a hero if given the chance. Throw the
stats out the window. Interestingly, the two guys who got
the clutch hits (Grace and Womack) are both lefties with
really short, compact swings. They both choke up a bit.
That's probably the type of lefty who can hit Rivera best,
considering the action of his fastball is down and into
the hands. Gonzo, with his long swing and open stance,
struggled, but fortunately the infield was in and he was able
to muscle that last pitch out even though he got jammed
yet again.
The weekend was rough on me. I was sick all weekend
and last night I woke up in the middle of the night,
feeling nauseous. I thought I was going to throw up,
but after sitting in the bathroom for a few minutes I
managed to fall back asleep. This morning I was
running a fever, light-headed. Then, somehow, the
Bears pulled out a miraculous victory against the
Browns. If Stanford, the Bears, and the Diamondbacks
had all lost I think I might have had to raid the liquor
cabinet tonight.
Wow, there's nothing quite like a game seven win,
a miracle comeback by the team you're rooting for.
For a short, happy moment, everything is right in
the world. The cares and worries of work and life
recede for a while, and you can just sit back and
share in the company of good friends.
P.S.: Jamie K., you're making the weblog tonight. For
admitting that you fell down while serving a tennis
ball. I'm trying to picture it in my head, and it's
giving me a chuckle.
P.S.S.: Byung-Hyun, you're off the hook kid. Come
back strong.

Stolen passport Yikes--a breach in

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Stolen passport


Yikes--a breach in MS Passport! You have to wonder how safe Microsoft Passport is
when every few weeks you hear about some security flaw
in Outlook, or Excel, or Internet Explorer.
Yes, security is hard. But if you want to launch a service
like Passport, that's the issue you choose to deal with.
The rewards are great, so I don't have any sympathy for
MS.
Personally, the idea of a wallet that travels with you online
is appealing, but I have felt no great need to adopt MS
Passport. As far as I can tell, it just allows me to avoid
having to type in my address and credit card. When I
first buy from some site, I like to go through the checkout
process b/c I'm trying to determine how safe it looks. And
if I've already bought from a store, I expect them to store
my credit card info anyway, so Passport doesn't buy
me much there.

Tragedy I feel so sorry

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Tragedy


I feel so sorry for Byung Hyun Kim. I even had him on my
rotisserie baseball roster for part of this season. The guy
is 22, playing in a foreign country where he doesn't speak
the language, and because his teammates in the bullpen
are lousy he has to grow up on the biggest stage in baseball
in the most intense of pressure situations one could
imagine.
First there was the 61 pitch relief outing (just 27 pitches
fewer than Curt Schilling threw in 7 innings) in Game Four.
Probably one of the longest relief outings of the season,
throwing out strange cases like Randy Johnson coming
in to pitch relief for Schilling in a rain delayed game. Then,
one night after his tragic defeat, he's back out there with
no days of rest for another inning. It was clearly still
Brenly's best relief pitching option, but man that's rough.
I really wanted him to strike out Brosius.
Thing is, his teammates can't even speak Korean, so how
do they empathize with him, truly make him feel like he
didn't just blow the World Series for his team? I can't help
but think of Donnie Moore, who killed himself after blowing
a save in the playoffs, or Rick Ankiel, who melted down in
the playoffs last year and is still trying to make it back
to the major leagues, or Mitch Williams, who was driven
out of baseball. Kim is talented. He throws side-arm/submarine
style, can crank his pitches up over 90 mph in that style,
and has filthy movement. I hope he recovers from all of this.
It does make me think that being a closer requires not
necessarily a particular repertoire of pitches but a
different sort of psychological makeup. So much can happen
in that one inning you pitch. Usually the score is tight.
One pitch or home run can lose the game, decisively.
All the good work your teammates did can be undone
quickly, and the blame would be centered on you.
You suspect Rivera has that type of makeup, though
since he's never blown a save in the postseason, we've
never seen how he would react.

Where's my cigarette Okay, just

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Where's my cigarette


Okay, just finished the first 1,848 words of my novel. They're
not necessarily the first words that will appear in my novel,
but it's a start. I knew it would be painful, and it hurt like
hell to sit down and write it. When you're out of practice
writing, it's difficult to string sentences together. Especially
when writing fiction, where the action has to come from
within. When you don't feel very strongly, it's like forcing
yourself to vomit. I feel spent. This will be a long, painful
month.
What's worse is that I really don't like much of what I
wrote today. Most days are like that. Anyone who doesn't
think writing is a tough job has never had to do it for a
living. Not just the first draft, but all the revisions. If I
had a craving for cigarettes, I would've smoked an
entire pack tonight.
Most of the scene I wrote today consists of the main
character getting his ass kicked.

Recycling Half of my trash

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Recycling


Half of my trash is paper catalogs. It's amazing. The decay in the value of catalogs is massive. The response rate for paper catalogs is a giant bell-curve, but massively shifted to the left (if you treat the x-axis as time, moving left to right). The catalog is sent, a ton of orders come in the next week, and then every week the order volume decays rapidly as the prices and merchandise go out of date.
Can't wait until e-commerce supplants paper catalogs completely and I can stop recycling all these dead trees.

Can't shut up Okay, okay,

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Can't shut up


Okay, okay, I should be working on my novel. But I must get a few things out.
The terrorists killed Halloween. Damn them! A few trick or treaters at Mayor Richard Daley's house in Chicago don't count (which makes me wonder what would happen if I could trick or treat at Bill Gates house, in his gated community--I'd probably get a copy of Windows XP professional).
I was at Dan's house for a Halloween party last night and was able to catch the end of the game yesterday. Bob Brenly screwed the pooch on that one, and Yankee haters across the nation let out a groan. Two things. Why start Curt Schilling on 3 days rest if you're going to then pull him after only 88 pitches and 7 innings? He should have been out there in the eighth inning to pitch to Spencer, Brosius, Soriano. The whole idea of starting him on 3 days rest is to try and press your advantage and win the series sooner, not later. If you hold him back to start game 7, you might as well give him 4 days rest and let him try to win the game by pitching it all the way through to the 9th. Brenly made a gutsy call to commit to start him on 3 days rest, and then backed off. I'm sure everyone's experienced that before--commit to a strategy, then back off halfway into it and switch courses, and end up worse off than if you'd committed one way or the other.
The other thing I would have done differently--Byung Hyun Kim is a side-arm submarine style pitcher. Lefties have a much easier time hitting right-handed pitchers who through that way. Granted, Kim is tough on all batters, but in 156 AB's against Kim this year he gave up 8 home runs, while in 179 AB's against Kim righties only hit 2 home runs. Swindell, the lefty, should've been in in the 9th inning. Swindell isn't exactly Steve Carlton, but at least then you force Torre's hand. He either leaves his lefties like Williams, Posada, O'Neill, and Martinez in, or he goes to his bench for a right-handed pinch hitter, of which he has no good ones. If Torre has one managerial flawy, it's his unwavering loyalty to old veterans like Luis Sojo, who he'd already used in a crucial situation, to his disadvantage, earlier in the series. Tino batted .257 against lefties this year, and .290 against righties. I suspect Torre might have gone to his bench in that case.
Well, I guess that point's debatable. Kim is their best reliever in a thin bullpen. I would lean towards trying to force Torre to use righties in that situation just b/c the righties on his bench had less power. Force them to beat you with a series of hits instead of one swing. But if Kim had retired all three lefties in the 9th we wouldn't be questioning the move. Kim scares me because he seems to survive on great movement and stuff, but not really on pinpoint control. That is, there's a much greater chance he'll serve up a fat one by mistake than someone like Rivera, who moves the ball in and out and doesn't let you beat him with the long ball. You have to hit cut fastballs off of him, either off your fists or off the plate, and that usually means you have to dink him to death. Relievers who just rely on dominant stuff are more susceptible to the long ball.
The other thing which any roto player knows is silly is to bat Mark Grace eighth. He hadn't batted there in ages. Putting a fast guy as your leadoff man is one of the most overrated baseball myths of all time. On-base-percentage is so much more important in a leadoff guy. Any decent mathematician could tell you that you should put your best hitters at the top of your lineup to maximize long-term run potential. I even saw it in my summer rec softball league, how teams would bat their best power hitters later in the lineup to let some small guys lead off (it's a more egregious error in softball since you can't steal and so few runs are scored on speed anyway). Gracie hit a homer of El Duque and should have gotten more at bats. And Womack, the speedster they put at the top of the lineup for his ability to steal bases? He got bunted over by the #2 batter in the order twice. If he's so fast, let him steal the damn base. Your number two batter in your lineup shouldn't be bunting in the first five innings.
The one thing you can't take away from the Yankees is that Jeter hit a homer off Kim, who is murder on righties. And that was Jeter's first time facing him. And Rivera is still the best post-season reliver of all time and once again he just shut people down. It sure seems like you have to manage perfectly, and be lucky, to beat the Yankees.
Damn Yankees.

Happy Halloween If you like

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Happy Halloween


If you like animation, have a really fast Internet connection,
and about 40 minutes to spare, you might consider watching
Blood: The Last Vampire today. Sputnik7 is streaming it
for free all day today, starting at 6pm EST. The movie itself
is not that great, it's more like a sketch than a film. But
the animation is gorgeous. James Cameron was a big fan.
Trick or treating is like hiking for children. I have happy
memories of trick or treating as a kid. Gathering with your
other childhood friends. My parents would buy me those
small plastic pumpkins to hold our candy (using a garbage
bag is just not right). Trying to see through the pitifully
small eyeholes in your plastic masks, we'd walk for
miles. We were like guerillas. Our parents would drive
us to the next neighborhood, drop us off, and we were
off, trying to hit every house that seemed inhabited.
Of course, we had to hit the wealthy neighborhoods,
under the simple assumption that somehow they might
offer up higher quantity or quality loot. I wonder when I
stopped trick or treating, when I determined that I was
too old to hike for free candy.
I like Sweet Tarts. Gummy Bears. The smell of a
Hershey's Chocolate bar.
Now, onto what really scares me. I committed to writing
a novel of at least 50,000 words next month, and next
month starts tomorrow. This is big news. Over 5000 people
across the country are doing it, and at last check Nanowrimo
was ranked #19 on Blogdex, which shouldn't be surprising.
The same people who set aside time to write in their
weblogs all the time are probably the best suited to
carve out an hour or two a day to write 1700 words or so.
So my weblog volume will be light the next month or so.
What is my novel about? I'm not really sure yet. I have
lots of things I'd like to write about, lots of themes I'm
interested in trying out. Given that I have to write just
about everyday, I think it will meander a bit. Maybe I'll
post it online. I haven't decided if I want to subject anyone
to having to read it.
Oh yeah. I love caramel apples with nuts on them.
That's probably the all-time best Halloween treat I
ever received. I wonder how that house could afford to
give those away.

Politics, religion, Series 7

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Sept. 11 has raised my interest in two topics about which I know very little. Politics and religion. I was raised in the most apolitical non-religious family I know. Not that I was a pagan or anything, but those topics just never came up. I have an inherent distrust of both, not based on anything in particular, mostly because I'm naturally a skeptic. Maybe it's that I have a hard time with any ideology (not sure if that's the right word) that draws a line in the sand and tells me I must be on one side or the other, and the other side is evil, or hell, or something like that.
Everyone in the US is suddenly pledging support for Bush? Even people like Clinton and Gore are saying, I'm supporting my president, let's follow his lead. A few months ago, half the populus considered him to be somewhat of a fool. I guess we want to present a unified front to the enemy and prevent any bipartisan politics from paralyzing our government and military. I wonder how long his grace period will last.
Rich called me from New York. He met the enemy, the Series 7 exam, and passed. Now just the Series 66 remains and he'll be back in Seattle. And then the phone calls will start (actually, he can just knock on my door). "Weeg, have you heard of a stock named General Motors? Well, my people have done an exhaustive study and have reason to believe that the share price will rise 35% to 50% in the next six months. Now, you don't know me, I don't know you, so I'm going to start you off small..."
Why do I have to "please use the revolving door"? Is there something wrong with the hinged doors? Someone must know.
Okay, some of you are sick of hearing about baseball, but damn it, I love the sport. Bob Brenly decided to let Curt Schilling pitch Game 4 on 3 days rest. Randy Johnson won't go until Game 6, though, since he can only pitch one more game anyway and you might as well give him 4 days rest. Then Schilling can come back for Game 7 if necessary. Some say sending your pitchers out on 3 days rest reduces their effectiveness. I think in this case it's a great move. Look, the Diamondbacks are old. Schilling, Johnson, Grace, Gonzalez, Williams--these guys are probably not going to get a chance to win another World Series. In fact, the whole Arizona franchise is in big trouble financially. Would you rather have a moderately tired Schilling pitching or a fully rested Brian Andersen or Miguel Batista? It's a great story, the aging warhorse going out firing.
They say the hardest pitch to hit in baseball is a good fastball, but I think a good hard split-fingered fastball might be right up there. Schilling, Clemens...in the old days, Mike Scott. Nomo. It looks like a fastball, but with the minimal rotation the pitch drops at the last minute. Located properly (start it just above the knees and it ends up at your ankles) it's just unhittable.
These are the days a sports fan's plate runs full. NBA season starting (Jordan's jumpshot was flat tonight), World Series, and college and pro football. Even hockey, if you're into that. Fall TV shows are starting up. Man, I might have to invest in one of these hacked Tivo's.
I've watched all 3 episodes of Smallville, and I enjoy it. I like how they've made Lex Luthor one of Clark's best friends. I find it so true to life that your greatest enemies come from those who are at some point ostensibly close to you. You can't have a bitter enemy who happens to be someone completely unknown to you. No, the worst rifts occur with people you try for the longest time to be friends with, to the point where you overlook things that usually drive you nuts to try and maintain the illusion. Finally, someday, it all bubbles to the surface and explodes and suddenly you're bitter enemies. At least that's what I think.
What was I talking about? Oh, Smallville. They've bought themselves a season's worth of storylines by expanding the effects of the kryptonite that exploded on earth when Clark arrived. Now it has infected people all over Smallville, giving Clark a slew of super-powered villains to deal with. They've also chosen to reveal his powers slowly, so we'll get to cycle through his first flight, the beginning of his x-ray vision, and eventually, I suppose, the arrival of his heat vision and the invention of his costume, perhaps.
But it seems every episode, just as he's about to thwart the enemy, somehow there's a whole supply of kryptonite nearby and his hand start rippling and he falls collapses. They've used that a few times already, and it will start to get old real soon.
I have a one in three chance. I'm going to try and make a collect call. One of three people will appear: Alyssa Milano in a leather body-hugging one-piece outfit, Carrot Top, or David Arquette. I have a 33% chance of meeting Alyssa Milano! I can't think of better odds anywhere, and it's all thanks to AT&T.

Vicious Much ado was made

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Vicious


Much ado was made about Microsoft's recent decision to
prevent browsers other than Internet Explorer from accessing
MSN.com. They later apologized and opened MSN.com
back up to all browsers.
Setting aside any ethical judgment of Microsoft (which was
universally condemned for their actions and whose apology
was judged disingenuous), you have to admire the aggressiveness
of that company. They are a mean survival machine, willing
to take on everyone, including the U.S. Government and
judicial system, by nearly whatever means necessary. They
live on the edge of illegal behavior, testing how far they can
go to ensure their dominance. Watching them take on
competitors is like watching a wolf set loose near a
flock of sheep.
Someday Microsoft will flame out, and I suspect it will
be spectacular to watch.

Waking Life Who is it

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Waking Life


Who is it that defends our country? I wonder what the
demographic make-up of our armed forces is. And how
it compares to the demographic profile of the United
States as a whole.
If China attacked the U.S. tomorrow, or some Chinese
terrorists flew some planes into the WTC, would I be
just as ready to join the army? Would I want to do so
more than I would otherwise?
What does it say to the rest of the world when their primary
interaction with our country is American cinema? Seriously,
when I think of how I interact with most foreign countries on
a day to day basis (thus I exclude the occasional vacation
as I can't afford otherwise) it's primarily through their movies and
occasionally through some of their citizens, traveling abroad.
Corporations have public relations departments to control
the perception of them by Wall Street, their investors.
Politicians and political parties are even more dependent
on public perception for their power than corporations, which
can show hard economic results to offset any subjective
assessments of their performance. I wish that politics
included some more truly concrete measurements for
political effectiveness and accomplishments. Because I've
seen what public relations is all about, and I've seen how the
press reacts to PR, and the process is horribly detrimental
to the truth. What we read or hear about politicians in
the press, from experts, from friends--it is like hearing a
person describe a courtroom artists sketch of a suspect.
What is it that causes so many sites to use mother's
maiden name as the question you have to answer to
retrieve your password? Is a person's mother's maiden
name really so hard to find out? Maybe it is. Someone
told me their mother's maiden name the other day and
I felt as if I suddenly had immense power over them.
If you didn't read that Chomsky article I referenced yesterday,
or maybe if you did and want to read more, a series of
interviews with him, conducted post Sept. 11, has been
published as an e-book titled 9/11.

The Dead We are fighting

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The Dead

We are fighting Osama abroad, but here at home we have to deal with anthrax-wielding lunatics. We have some sickos among us, and the nation needs to take some antibiotics. What is the equivalent of societal Cipro? Thanks for the link to Media Whores Online, which hard-core liberals will want to bookmark.
And before you offer your unwavering support for our government, you may wish to read this transcript of a Q&A with Noam Chomsky. He offers his usual astute but somewhat extreme observations about the current situation and how our government is able to define the moral
terminology of this battle against Osama. Not that Osama isn't a bad man that deserves to be spanked. But nothing is ever as clean as it appears, and by the time this is all over, everyone's hands will be dirty. Let's not pretend that there aren't lots of poor Afghans dying right now because we've cut off aid, or bombed the hell out of the land that they live in. To defend the way that we live, though, perhaps we must accept that type of moral arithmetic. Anyway, go read the article. Chomsky is nothing if not thought-provoking, even if he's impossible to debate and slightly insane.
Getting nostalgic for the early days of the web? Take yourself back.
Dubya popped up on the scoreboard during the seventh inning stretch of Game One of the World Series and once again said "make no mistake about it." In this case,
"Make no mistake about it, we will triumph over the evil ones." Something like that. Dubya, YOU make no mistake about it.
Finally visited Blogdex today. It crawls weblogs all over the web and has indexes for the most linked to websites among
weblogs. Interesting stuff from the all-time index:
Blogger is number one. Seems to be the most popular weblog software by far. I wonder if it was that mention in Wired magazine. That's how I first heard of it.
Lots of random weblog related community sites, indexes.
Then Google shows up. Not surprisingly. The search engine of choice for, well, everyone I know. One of the great user interfaces of this first era of the popular world wide web.
The Onion is next at number six. As the Simpsons starts to get long in the tooth, perhaps it is The Onion which has come to carry the banner for humor for those who like to think of themselves as cognoscenti of fine humor.
If you take the word of the community as gospel, then the king of personal weblogs is kottke.org, the top-ranked personal weblog.
Second to Blogger in popularity in the weblog software arena is Greymatter.
CNN.com is the highest ranked news site. Then come three sites I also use a lot: Salon, Memepool, Slashdot.org. Man, I'm like the average weblogger. I link to those sites all the time.
I just realized that song they play at the Mariners games when Kazuhiro Sasaki comes into the game comes from a Paul Oakenfold CD. Of course, he may have stolen, er, sampled it from someone else. It's off of Two Years of Oakenfold at Cream,
Disc One. Not sure what track #. Just in case you want to play it on those days when you need that extra motivation when being called down for breakfast.
My football cup runneth over. Stanford is #14 in the latest BCS rankings, and the Bears made a miraculous comeback today against the hated 49ers to move to 5-1. No one in Seattle really plays football. I miss going out on fall days with Nate, Rick, Vijay, Pavan, and all those folks to chuck the football around. The college days, with no pads hitting, the annual Rice Bowl, and the feeling of pain all over the body the next day. Of all the types of athletic pain I've felt in my life, nothing matched that. There's nothing better than hitting some weight-room sculpted meathead so hard he forgets his own name. My roommate Mark, who was no big weight-lifter, put a hit on some guy that gave him a concussion, and I still remember the sound of it so many years later.
I'm not sure how Stanford made it to #14 in the BCS. I remember a bunch of sites picked us to be last in the Pac-10 this year. We never have any Heisman caliber athletes, and we don't really crank out a lot of Pro-Bowl NFL studs. Teyo Johnson is perhaps our only truly freakish athletic talent. Our backup QB, and now starter, Chris Lewis, is raw, erratic. Throws a lot of interceptions. Our defense is not going to earn any nicknames. Must be good coaching.
In preparation for the novel I'm going to write starting Thursday, I've started transcribing James Joyce's The Dead again. Hopefully the ghost of Joyce's soul will inhabit me for a few hours a day. Enough to crank out 2000 words or so.
Bill bought a house. I wish I could pull the trigger. If I thought I'd definitely stay in Seattle another 3 years I'd do the same. Renting feels so 26.

New vocabulary

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From Zentertainment:
"NEW OXFORD AMERICAN DICTIONARY released this week, including trip-hop (combination of dub reggae and hip-hop), limousine liberal (wealthy liberal), dumpster diving (trawling through trash for hidden treasure), Blue Dog Democrat (conservative democrat), hinky (dishonest or unreliable person), lawn flamingo (plastic bird as garden ornament), sticker shock (experienced by shoppers encountering higher-than-expected prices), and wildcraft (the gathering of herbs, plants, and fungi from the wild).
There are also several new topical definitions including Afghan kaftan (dust obscuring bombing zone), asymmetrical warfare (current euphemism for terrorism), bunker buster (bomb designed to destroy underground installations), cutaneous anthrax (anthrax contracted via the skin)."

Episode II

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I have a pass to a bright and early screening of Monsters Inc. on Saturday, in Renton. I normally wouldn't drive all the way out there just to see a screening, but they're showing the new Episode II teaser trailer before it. Hmmmm.
Waking Life opens in Seattle tomorrow. Hooray!
No one these days says "hooray" anymore. It went the way of whitewashed jeans.
I've taken the plunge and decided to participate in Nanowrimo. So November will be a busy busy month for me. Writing a novel, another wedding to attend, a big transition at work, lots of business trips to L.A., a trip to Boston for Thanksgiving, and then the start of my annual tour of duty at one of our distribution centers to help out for the holiday season. It will be a light month on the weblog, I predict.
I'm trying to add a comment system to my weblog, so that people can attach comments to my blogs, or so that I can go back in time and laugh at foolish things I once wrote. My darn webhost charges a lot for PHP, so I think I have to wait for Blogback or something like that.

Happy birthday Todd

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Okay, this one's a little early. The next time I hang out with Todd, I can write about having spent time with my married friends. My fondest memories with Todd, besides his wedding, of course, all involve riding two-wheeled human-powered machines up sharply inclined masses of earth. We kicked some older dudes' asses up Lewis and Clark bridge during STP, and then Todd dragged me up the side of Whistler Mountain on our mountain bikes. I nearly passed out the last time, but managed to retain enough energy to outrace some black bears on our descent.

What's the Word? I've thought

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What's the Word?


I've thought about getting a Mac for video editing. I'm curious,
though. If you don't want to pay for Microsoft Word on the
Mac ($350!?!) what is the default word processing application?
Is there one? A much cheaper alternative? I can do spreadsheets
and presos and image editing and stuff on my Windows PC,
but I have to at least have a minimally sophisticated word
processing app for my Mac. Especially if I get a laptop.
What do you know, readers?

Leggo my Cipro! Here's a

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Leggo my Cipro!


Here's a classic test of patriotism. It's easy to wave the flag
when terrorists kill thousands of your fellow citizens, and it's
easy to salute your brave police and firemen and emergency
personnel. Now the threat of anthrax has everyone feeling
nervous, and a few people I know are hitting websites to stock
up on Cipro, even if they are at low risk of contracting anthrax
and are currently as healthy as can be. We studied this in
econ--it's the tragedy of the commons.
If everyone in an interconnected network (I think we studied
this particularly as it applied to democratic, capitalistic
societies) optimizes for their own well-being, i.e. stocks up
on cipro, then the entire society's well-being is undermined,
i.e., people who really are sick with anthrax can't get
Cipro.
So don't stock up on Cipro unless you really need it. If you
somehow catch Anthrax, count on society to get you the
necessary medication. It's a bit harder than waving a flag,
but no less patriotic.

Germs ...of an idea for

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Germs


...of an idea for my novel for Nanowrimo are starting to grab
hold. Yes, that's a bad pun to use in these times, but in
fact the novel would have to deal with Sept. 11, in some ways.
I have the general themes and some of the short stories
that will support those themes. I need to start flushing it
out a bit.
Nowhere Girl is good. "Ever have the feeling you're an
accessory in someone else's life?" Yes!
New project at work is...involving. I have not yet synthesized
it all in my head. Sometimes the path becomes crystal clear,
but for now, it's all just murky and massive. I dreamed about
it last night.