triv.org

I have to go to the dentist again. A filling in a canine of mine came out. I'm lucky in that it doesn't hurt, but it feels bizarre and looks worse. I have no idea how or when it happened, or where the filling itself is. I was running my tongue over my teeth when suddenly there was a hole there. After a moment of panic, I realized, "Gee, a filling came out." Then I made arraignments to have it fixed. Between then and now if you run into me: yes, there's a thing in my tooth; no, I don't like it; yes, I'm getting it fixed.

I've put up the christmas skins. Now if only putting the lights on the house was as easy...

At least there was a turkey.

Thanksgiving dinner for my family started out with plans for both grandmothers, all the aunts and uncles on my father's side, and various cousins thereof. This would have been good, and possibly funny when my Grandma Kloor and Grandma Reinhardt got together. We were going to go down to Adrian, watched the Lions loose, and eat some turkey.

My Aunt Lynne and Uncle Mike are still going thru their convalescence. They had a bad run of health this fall, and they just weren't up to hosting a thanksgiving. Then my cousin Scott go mono, and something happened to keep my grandma Reinhardt away - the details of which I never quite understood. So there we were, at my parents house with my Grandma Kloor.

I am not implying that I had a bad thanksgiving. I didn't. It was very small however, when less than a week before it looked as though it would be very big. Anyways, we cooked a good turkey, I made some excellent gravy, and then we had coffee. My Uncle Scott was having some computer trouble, so the next step was to head out to his house and work on that.

If there is a computer problem in my family, I'm the one that gets called. I'm used to this. I've accepted this. It isn't a problem except for those phone calls that present you with a problem that is so inexplicable that you never come close to solving it. I think I stared at their G4 for a good twenty minutes trying to get it to boot correctly. Even in verbose mode, there wasn't anything obvious; the thing just stopped halfway thru the boot. In the end I reformatted the whole thing and reinstalled Tiger.

At least there was coffee.

Kyle and Erin came out yesterday. We had food, drink, and pool. We came back to the villa, and I dragged Natalie and Sarah over. Sarah had to leave for work soon, which was sad, but Natalie and the three of us had a very interesting and sometimes intense conversation. Seems I keep myself from being happy - or at least that's what I'm told. Turns out that Natalie likes sautéed mushrooms, so she's ok.

There also seems to be a bit of a conspiracy brewing over getting certain people to hook up. It's nice to be part of a conspiracy. Not an evil conspiracy, those are a threat like bears. Bears are cold, ruthless killing machines. No, this is the warm fuzzy type of conspiracy. Who said what about who doing what? Why? Ahh. I see.

Now I'm going to go clean up my kitchen and make some stew.

Tome Engelhardt has perhaps the best editorial on the Iraq war's effects on national politics I have ever read. You should read it. You should read it right now.

Right now I'm in my lab for computer science, and I swear to god - we're watching something taped from the History channel. I'm not sure how robots are connected to data structures, but here we are. We've payed $750 to take this class, and at this point, I don't think I'm getting my money's worth. We have a group project for this class, and lab is one of the few times the class can work on it together. Yet, here we are, watching an old tape on robots.

I'm pissed.

For the last five years or so, it has been my responsibility to make the gravy at thanksgiving. I take this very seriously, and have in the past produced good, but not excellent gravy. It tended to be lump free, but never quite thick enough, and almost always lacking in flavor. I think I may have licked the problem however.

Jon and Jo has a thanksgiving meal for friends at their house. It was a good time. Lots of wine, lots of food, lots of friends; the sort of dinner party you can get behind. I made stuffing - sage stuffing with coriander and sweet onions, and I made gravy. First I made a roux. I got it down to the peanut butter stage, just when the flavor is starting to get complex. Plus at that point the color is just right for turkey gravy. I took the pan juices, reduced them down with some white wine, bay leaves, cloves, and giblet stock, and then add the roux. I continued to cook this for a while, until it reach the right consistency. I took the bay leaves and cloves out, added a little white pepper and it was done. And it was perfect. I'm going to make this gravy again for the family thanksgiving.

I did all this is my new Calphalon Chef's pan, which to me is more like a Saucier. Either way, I quite like the pan. I think I'm going to bring it up to Fenton along with my new gravy recipe.

For the first time in my life, I was in a church for a regular service. I have been to church for weddings, and for every Christmas; but in my 24 years I have never been to a regular service. Recently I have been harshly areligious, but I seem to mellowing on that front. I would call myself a secularist these days.

Sarah had called me. The plan was to get together for dinner and a movie with some of my friends and some of hers. Then she said that they wanted to go to church, and I was suddenly a deer staring into a growing pair of headlights. I couldn't move. I was either going to church - something I didn't do - or I was going to have to tell her that I didn't want to go to church. The former would involve a new experience, the latter can involve a very awkward conversation and/or personal insult.

So I ended up in church. I wasn't converted. My soul remains in peril. I did enjoy the sermon though. It was so much a sermon as a theological discussion, and I enjoy a good theological discussion. I didn't agree with some of the points made, but that's not really the point.

To me though, it didn't seem like church. My family tends towards churches with a sense of formality. There should be pews, and stained glass, and some vestments. This seemed to relaxed to be church to me. I know that this is just childhood familiarity coming forward, but the thought seems to be sticking with me.

As an aside: their bass player was great. Gotta see if he's in a band.

I'm just going to say one thing about this weekend. I called it. Totally, completely, called it.

American girl makes dolls. Non-Barbie dolls. Dolls with a body form that a person could maintain without an eating disorder. We're talking the sort of wholesome, all-american, nothing-interesting-happening-here fun that the right likes to give their children.

So, when American Girl donated $50,000 to Girls Inc, there was a bit of a brewhaha. Seems that Girls Inc was taking a position that was anti-gaybashing and for a woman's right to choose. Things that most americans agree with. However, one should never underestimate the right's capacity for blowing something out of proportion. To quote a quote in newsweek:

Girls Inc is pro-abortion and pro-conception and pro all the other lies the secular world wants our girls to be believe.

It's one thing to be conservative. It's one thing to be religious. That there. That's just disturbing.

Newsvine. It sounds cool. I have no idea if it will actually work, or scale up to any meaningful size, but I plan to play with it once it's open. The real question is if the quality of the conversation makes it a place to engage in conversation, or if it quickly becomes a slashdot thread, filled with "experts" pontificating on topics they "know about."

At some point I became one of those crazed java programmers. The sort that uses recursive type signatures. The guy that uses Interfaces with glee, just to get some real polymorphism in the language. Inner classes, anonymous classes, generic classes, enumerated classes, abstract classes. Then again, this is probably connected to the fact that you have to write classes to get anything done in java. This some code I wrote today for a class project:

public enum SortOrder {
    ASCENDING  { 
        <T extends Comparable<T>> boolean compare(T x, T y) { 
            return x.compareTo(y) < 0; 
        } 
    },
    DESCENDING { 
        <T extends Comparable<T>> boolean compare(T x, T y) {
            return y.compareTo(x) < 0; 
        } 
    };

    abstract <T extends Comparable<T>> boolean compare(T x, T y);
}

I should not be as amused by that as I am.

I can't seem to wrap my mind around why people were so excited about the live episode of The West Wing. Yes, it was a fascinating hypothetical; but fascinating hypotheticals does not a drama make. We get the point John, you want to see real debate and real ideas in american politics. So do I. So does everyone.

After trying to subtly bring that point to bear for the first half of this season, we had the point smashed into our brains last sunday. I would give my two front teeth to see a real presidential debate like the one on the west wing. It was engaging, erudite, educational, and fun. It was not however, a good hour of dramatic television. Time magazine called the conflict between Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits something that the old seasons lacked. That may be true, but I don't think the live debate moved that tension forward in any real way.

It was, in the end, the most political of things. It was a stunt for attention. There is a bit of post-modern-life-reflects-art-reflects-life flair in that. While the hype of a live yet scripted show seemed to be droning out any criticism of the show, the fact remained that it wasn't all that good. We didn't leave the hour with any new insight, feelings, or opinions on the characters. Heck, we only got to see two of them. I left that hour feeling disappointed, not only in the show but in the real debates. And if I can both not like the episode, and feel effected by it... well I suppose that's something.

There is a class here at Eastern that I'm going to test out of: COSC 231 - Exploration in Internet-based Computing. Basically, it's the "let's make webpages" class. My friend John is taking it at the moment, and I was rather shocked to hear about the class.

First off, the use of stylesheets is prohibited. That is completely, utterly, absolutely, flat wrong. It's as though they are teaching Java and telling people not to use classes. It's as thought they're teaching music and telling people to not use musical notation. Stylesheets are the absolute right way to control the cosmetics of a modern website. Without them, your website is forced into a quagmire of font tags and color attributes, none of which contain any structural value.

The deeper point here is that the HTML of your page is supposed to describe the structure of the data. "This is a list. This is a header. This is a more important header. This word is important. This word isn't" The style sheet then tells the browser to make the important words bold and the headers green.

Why go thru all this? The simplest reason is accessibility. If a blind person is visiting the site with a reader, then only way that the reader can make sense of the HTML document is if that document has a structure. Once you put style information in the HTML document, that hope is lost.

On top of that, font tags and bgcolor attributes aren't valid in modern versions of HTML. Yes browsers will still work with the page, but that doesn't make it right. It's perfectly valid to write a C program where you name your variables var1, var2, var3, var4, var5, var6, var7 and so forth; but that doesn't mean you've written a good program.

I'm half tempted to hunt the professor down and give him or her a piece of my mind, but I probably won't. I want to get along with the department. I will, however, test out of the class. 221 was boring but basically correct, I don't think I could take boring and wrong.