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Tire Shaving

Got a lovely litle flat on the Subaru a few nights ago – fatal stab wound to the sidewall (well, glass most likely – I doubt we got slashed!), not repairable. So the dealer dryly informs us that because it’s an all-wheel drive, it’s critical that all tires have exactly the same radius. If you mix worn tires with new on an AWD, the constant work of matching rotational speeds in the differential can heat up the drive train and cause damage. Hrmmm… Amy does some quick googling and comes up with this — apparently it’s possible to buy just one new tire and have it shaved — lathed down to match the tread depth of the other three, for a sum total of $35 over the cost of the new tire. Wonder why the dealer didn’t suggest shaving… (a facetious question, in case it wasn’t obvious).

Music: Billy Jenkins Voice of God Collective :: Motorway at Night
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The Life Aquatic and Seu Jorge

Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic gives me hope for the future of filmmaking – I haven’t seen a movie this gorgeously cinematic, this surprising, this full of dry humor and great music and perfect frames one after another for… how long? A masterpiece.

Punctuated throughout by Seu Jorge playing David Bowie songs on acoustic guitar, solo, in Portuguese. “Ziggy Stardust” from the crow’s nest, “Rock and Roll Suicide” from a shack on the beach… poetic and weird and beautiful in a way I never expected. Need to find more Seu…

Music: Wilco :: Theologians
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Teens Want To Debate Limbaugh

When Rush Limbaugh decided to lambaste what he perceives as a crisis of multiculturalism in American education, he should oughtn’t of picked on Evanston Township High School. “All ETHS sophomores choose among several “global perspectives” courses covering the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Asia and Russia.” Imagine the crisis – students learning about the rest of the world! What Limbaugh apparently didn’t know was that ETHS students also do extremely well on standardized tests of U.S. history.

“What multiculturalists is, is balkanizing this country,” Limbaugh said Tuesday.

Students respond:

Until 10th grade, all we did was U.S. and European history. It’s just so false that what he says is funny.

Now some of the students want to debate him in U.S. history. I wonder if they’re accepting wagers. Would be more lucrative than bake sales…

Music: Seu Jorge :: Pequines e pitbull
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Big 5

Happy fifth anniversary to Amy and me! I guess the fact that it doesn’t seem anything like five years is testament to how much we enjoy one another’s company. Amy, choosing to spend my life with you was the best decision I’ve ever made. I feel that as strongly today as I did the day we met.

The greatness of the day much dampened by excruciating pain emanating from my upper right molar. Can’t eat anything but soup, can’t even let my uppers and lowers touch. Talking is difficult. Couldn’t sleep last night for the pain. Saw an endodontist this morning, turns out the nerve is dead and complications abound. Good thing that crown I got a couple of weeks ago was temporary, since the dentistas con drillistos are going back into the hole. Can’t get a root canal until Tuesday. It’s going to be a long three days on an antibiotic regimen, plus generous doses of ibuprofen and vicodin.

Oh, and it’s Mom’s birthday. And Friday 13th. Strange days.

Music: Cream :: Strange Brew
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Ride of Silence

Days getting longer, doing more biking, and feeling the close calls with cars again. The orange vest seems to help (a few drivers seem to equate safety orange with “government employee” and become deferential), but it’s amazing to see what drivers will do even when you know they see you – things they would never do if I were another car, since then I’d be a threat to their fender integrity. All of this gets me thinking about Matthew again, and then I learn about the upcoming Ride of Silence:

On May 18, at 7 PM across the country and around the world, cyclists will take to the roads in a silent protest of what they call carnage taking place on the streets. Although cyclists have a legal right to share the road with motorists, much of the motoring public doesn’t seem aware they are there.

Wyn Aldrich tells me Matthew’s name has been added to the list of bicyclists who have been killed by cars, and is to be among those commemorated at this year’s nation-wide event.

Music: Fred Frith :: the boy beats the rams
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Enigmatic Vignette #14

Biking home from work, saw a police cruiser parked behind a late-model Corolla, lights flashing. Occupants of the vehicle standing outside the car talking to officers, both wearing karate or judo robes tied with black belts. Karate Dude #1 holding his cell phone up, screen flipped out toward the face of Officer #1, as if showing him an image. Officer #1 shaking his head slowly at the phone, looking puzzled. Officer #2 seemed to be studying Karate Dude #2’s getup.

Tried to write the caption to this scene in my head the rest of the way home.

Music: Henry Threadgill’s Zooid :: Around My Goose
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Sync Is Something Else

Being one of those fools with more MP3s than will fit on any iPod ever made, I’ve never used iPod/iTunes in sync mode – I’ve been more than content to drag tracks and playlists in manually, remove them when ready to move on. Listening to podcasts changed that dynamic. Unlike music, podcasts aren’t something you want to keep around — listen once or twice and discard.

But suddenly there was a need to manually update my “Podcast” playlist on a near-daily basis, which meant a several-step process: Delete tracks from the iTunes playlist (and from the Library, via the Delete Selected Tracks AppleScript), ditto on the iPod. Populate the iTunes list manually, drag its contents over… the process was seriously harshing my mellow. The patient’s passages needed to be unobstructed by food particles and other debris; there had to be a free flow from RSS reader to iTunes to iPod, effortless. Discovering that NetNewsWire 2.0 could be made to automatically add enclosures to a specific playlist in iTunes partially mitigated the hassle, but still required deleting old content before downloading so that old and new didn’t get all mixed up.

Then I discovered what most iPod users have probably known all along – when an iPod is plugged in and you access iTunes’ preferences, you can tell it to just synchronize certain lists. Keen. But when I did that for the Podcast list and sync’d, was amazed to see that the rest of the content on the iPod had been wiped. Not only that, but the contents of the iPod were grayed out in iTunes. Allowing sync to take over meant that everything from now on was going to have to be sync’d – no more manual updates. Which meant that if I also wanted music, I’d have to create new playlists for the purpose and tell them to sync as well.

Funny – this is how the iPod was “meant” to be used, but in almost three years I had never seen iPod sync in action. Not sure I like it, but it’s workable. Can’t help but think there’s got to be a better way. I’d prefer to stay in manual mode, but be allowed to designate specific lists as sync-able.

And now the plot is thickening. Some sites are taking such a huge bandwidth hit from podcast downloads that they’re turning to the distributed model of BitTorrent. That makes good sense, but to keep the flow intact, RSS readers that handle attachments will need to gain the ability to handle BitTorrent files, or pass the job over to the BitTorrent client, then move the decompressed archive back over to iTunes. Small pieces loosely joined, sure, but someone’s got to do the joining. Meanwhile, I’ve stopped listening to Slashdot news and a few others.

While we’re talking smooth integration, someone’s got to solve the problem of sites like philosophytalk, which only cast in Real or other proprietary formats.

Bonus horror: Downloading some fresh casts tonight, when the iPod totally locked up (as Dorothy Parker famously uttered, “What fresh hell is this?”). Then I realized that iTunes, NetNewsWire, and the Finder had all locked up as well, a tangle that ultimately turned into a forced reboot. FireWire bus problems are pretty much an uptime kill on any platform, but damn, that was egregious.

Update: I don’t think the problem was the FireWire bus after all. Something deeper happened, probably on the motherboard. This morning there’s a thin blue line running vertically down the left side of the screen, about 2″ from the left bezel. A reboot didn’t make it go away. Looks like it may be time for this one to go to the shop.

Music: The Magnetic Fields :: The Things We Did
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Environmental Heresies

Environmentalist / futurist Stewart Brand, who founded the original Whole Earth Catalog as well as the legendary electronic community The Well, and who is now involved with The Long Now Foundation has written an excellent piece for Technology Review on changes of heart — and needed changes of heart — within the environmental movement.

He starts by separating environmentalists into scientists, who “live to admit their mistakes,” and lay-environmentalists, who are often romantics and have trouble changing course. For example, while much of the environmental movement still clings to old ideas about indefinitely expanding populations being the greatest umbrella threat to the environment, world populations are actually in rapid freefall as rural areas empty out and people move to the city (life in the country encourages lots of children, life in the city discourages same). Most environmentalists have not yet gotten the message that population changes are now actually working in their favor.

He also makes some interesting cases about genetically modified foods. For example, the Amish, who are among the world’s best farmers, have enthusiastically embraced genetically modified crops. And he makes the point that environmental concerns like protecting wild spaces (a goal he embraces) are helpless against invasive species of flora and fauna, which do as much or more harm to the natural balance as man. “I can’t wait for some engineered organism, probably microbial, that will target bad actors like zebra mussels and eat them, or interrupt their reproductive pathway, and then die out.”

And then he gets to the zinger we knew was coming, re: climate change:

So everything must be done to increase energy efficiency and decarbonize energy production. Kyoto accords, radical conservation in energy transmission and use, wind energy, solar energy, passive solar, hydroelectric energy, biomass, the whole gamut. But add them all up and it’s still only a fraction of enough. Massive carbon “sequestration� (extraction) from the atmosphere, perhaps via biotech, is a widely held hope, but it’s just a hope. The only technology ready to fill the gap and stop the carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere is nuclear power.

I do disagree with Brand on this: “Gas-electric hybrid vehicles are now on the road, performing public good.” Hybrid vehicles may be less bad than gas-only cars, but “performing public good?” No matter how efficient, cars still take up way too much space in comparison to the number of passengers they typically transport, lead to congestion and the relentless paving over of the planet, and discourage bicycle and public transport. Hybrids are good, but they don’t “fix” the problem of cars in the larger picture.

There are other things to quibble with in Brand’s essay, but it seems clear that the environmental movement is entering a period of deep reflection. To achieve its goals, it will have to honestly question its positions on the very pillars of its philosophy. To save the planet, environmentalists have to be intellectually honest and begin debate on many of their fundamental planks. And that debate has barely started.

Related links at Metafilter.

Music: Joni Mitchell :: The Boho Dance
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Vacuum Train

Vacuum Train In 20 years, when Miles joins M.I.T.’s Time Traveler’s Conference and attendees ask him about his first invention, he’ll be able to tell them he taped a vacuum cleaner attachment to the funnel of a steam train as a toddler. OK, he had a bit of help, but it was his idea, and he did most of the taping. Unfortunately, his attempt to make a cow catcher out of Scotch tape didn’t fare nearly as well.

Music: The Kinks :: Misfits
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Unused Applications

There’s a Windows machine on the desk next to me, almost never touched except for browser compatibility testing. Though it sits there mostly unused, it’s been taken over by spyware in the past few months, and had slowed to a crawl. Took the opportunity to back up data, wipe the drive, and install XP/SP2. I did install Thunderbird and Firefox on it, but other than that, it’s virgin.

Unused Icons Woke it up today and a friendly little balloon winked into existence, saying “There are unused icons on your desktop. Would you like to run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard?” I wanted to see what it would do. Should I be shocked that the only two icons the wizard wanted to remove from my desktop were for Thunderbird and Firefox? These are the only two applications on the computer that I have used. No, I’m not shocked. Standard Operating Procedure for MS. Business as usual.

Speaking of these friendly little balloons, I had to chuckle after installing VirtualPC on my Mac at home a few months ago (also for browser compatibility testing). Almost as soon as Windows launched on the Mac for the first time, a balloon informed me that I was “missing critical updates,” and that my “computer might not be secure.” Boy, that was comforting! I’m starting to love the little balloons.

Music: Firehose :: The First Cuss