My writings, photos, music and links
Hi
A reader kindly let me know he had trouble posting a comment here. I had cranked down the security on commenting too far (in fighting comment spam) and accidentally blocked discussion. Whoops. The comments are now open again and I welcome any non-commercial thoughts anyone reading this might care to share. Cheers.
“I am watching Obama drive to his inauguration right now. The genius of this experiment is that a revolution can look like this.”
- T. Bone Burnett, 1/20/2009
“Da da! [dadadadadadada]” — perhaps even “Hi Dada”? — first spoken Friday.
Definitely language, not babble. She looks right at me, smiles, and says “Dada!”. 
First 2 teeth (bottom) came in 12/25 and 12/26.
She also slept 10 hours unassisted last night (with just a few brief crying wake-ups).
The end of our constant sleep deprivation may be in sight.
Abi played with finger-paint for the first time this weekend too and has to do everything herself.
Learning slide guitar.
Banging on OWL at work.
Reading Tom Waits’ biography and City at the End of Time.
Listening to Beirut, The National, Waits, The Low Anthem
Needing more fresh air, more time for making music, more time with friends, more exercise, more sleep. Grateful as hell for this little family of mine.
Good night.
From an interesting thread on my favorite blog:
I love how when you get out beyond the feeble reaches of our local, Newtonian perceptual framework just how fantastically, unbelievably *strange* things become. Quantum mechanics are simply mind-blowing. Some rational experts in the field have concluded that at its most irreducible form, the Universe is in fact comprised of mathematical axioms. Which sounds ridiculous until you start looking at alternate explanations. We understand so very little. Yet it’s so damn beautiful.
My aging PC (a mostly home-built frankenstein AMD64×2 Windows XP box) crashed and burned last week. I had properly backed up nearly everything of importance (with a few painful exceptions) and decided it was time to get the Mac Pro I’d been coveting for a long time. After consulting w/ Mac-owning friends I settled on a refurbished 2.8GhZ quad-core from Apple, which arrived two days ago. It’s a gorgeous piece of hardware, inside and out, and I know I will appreciate OS X increasingly the more time I spend with it. I think it’s good for me finally to leave the comfort of XP. (In the last few years I’ve spent some reasonably happy months with Ubuntu, some wasted hours trying to get Gentoo Linux to work, and have played some w/ others’ OS X Macs, but most of my time has been spent in XP at home and at work.) The not-quite-the-same keyboard mappings are still bugging me, e.g. use of Alt instead of Ctrl to skip to the next word, and other off-by-one-key differences… I’m still using the same Logitech keyboard and a KVM switch to share it (and the mouse and monitor) across my work laptop and home machine, toggling back and forth… so the context-switching while likely good for me like broccoli is not much fun. Here’s hoping that becomes second nature soon! And there have been some annoyances, like wasting time finding the keyboard mapping for ejecting the optical disk tray (hold down F12 for a couple seconds — no button in the UI, no hardware button!)… but worst of all is not being able to read the backup USB drive. It’s FAT32 but large (a single 149GB partition). My XP laptop can read/write no problem, but for all its “I can do anything [PC] can do better” promise, OS X (a) thinks it’s NTFS when it’s definitely FAT32, and (b) can’t read or mount it. Argh. And it doesn’t seem to ship with a partition tool, even for an external disk. So I’m forced to use a *third party* OS just to access a standard hard drive formatted w/ the most ubiquitous easy filesystem of this decade. Fail. Anyway those gripes aside I’m psyched to finally be on a Mac and look forward to the improved UI and configurability and security and multimedia processing prowess it provides.
My friend Bill said my iPhone was a gateway drug. Heheheh.
The choices before us as a nation are not about “Capitalism” versus “Socialism” (let alone all the baggage those terms entail). Rather, it’s about enlightened capitalism with a holistic view of cost-benefit analysis, versus market fundamentalism and anti-social greed.
From Taplin:
Beyond regulating the most anti-social and greedy members of the business society for the common good, the government will have to be like a venture capital investor in the same way that DARPA built the first Internet. We are now about to embark on an experiment in how this kind of investment in “Public Goods” can raise productivity for the private sector as well as the society as a whole. Universal Broadband, 21st Century schoolrooms, massive solar and wind farms, a smart electricity grid–these are the foundations of a Green New Deal.
Yes, yes, and yes.
A funny story about the stock market:
Once upon a time, in a place overrun with monkeys, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.
The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them.
The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, they became harder to catch, so the villagers stopped their effort.
The man then announced that he would now pay $20 for each one. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. But soon the supply diminished even further and they were ever harder to catch, so people started going back to their farms and forgot about monkey catching.
The man increased his price to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so sparse that it was an effort to even see a monkey, much less catch one.
The man now announced that he would buy monkeys for $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf.
While the man was away the assistant told the villagers, “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has bought. I will sell them to you at $35 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”
The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys.
They never saw the man nor his assistant again, and once again there were monkeys everywhere.
Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.
This is kinda corny but I like it anyway:
http://www.zefrank.com/from52to48withlove/
Guest shopping is a new feature at Upromise — the college savings program — where I work. The idea is simple: if you are not a Upromise member, but you want to help me to save money for Abi and Harper’s college funds, you can follow their guest shopping link and earn contributions for them when you shop online. It’s free and there’s no registration. Upromise doesn’t collect any information about you, rather you follow a special link that makes your shopping session behave as if it were me. You also get access to free shipping and other Upromise offers, which benefit you.
So, if you’re not a Upromise member and you feel like helping Abi and Harper as you do your holiday shopping online, please use this link:
Guest Shopping Link for Abi and Harper
Thanks!
=)
P.S. If you do this, I will eventually see some extra contributions to their account, but I will NOT know who was responsible, as the guest shopping service maintains your privacy. So, thanks in advance!
A couple years ago I composed and recorded a custom score for a short film by my good friend Ben Pugh. My music isn’t going to win any awards, but the film is as warm-hearted and funny as its creator and it was a fun and rewarding project. Ben recently posted an edited version (6 min, instead of 11) to youtube, and I’m referencing it here. Some of the audio work I did timed scene cuts and moods precisely, so the audio is a bit rougher in this shortened version… but it is still a great little story told by my good friend and I’m psyched to have been part of it. Let me know what you think!
