Thursday, 08/28/03

The most entertaining baseball statistic I've seen on a TV screen all year is Lou Piniella's lifetime win-loss record, as a manager, on his birthday: 5-10. Now 6-10. Happy birthday, Lou. 05:35PM «

Tuesday, 08/19/03

Two years ago in a fit of Churchill envy, I bought a couple of configurable steel shelving units from Costco and a small mahogany door from Home Depot and built myself a standing desk. I believed that standing at my primary writing environment would be a subtle physical constraint on wasting time at the computer. Having noticed that I'm more likely to solve problems and think useful thoughts while on a walk, or washing dishes, or in the shower than I am when at the desk confronted with all the details, it seemed reasonable to expect that my thinking-to-typing ratio would improve at a standing desk as well.

I failed to count on a few factors. One of them was television. When I got tired of standing, I frequently found myself walking into the room with the television, which was also equipped with a couch. It proved easier to sit there, and arrange to be distracted by Tivo's gentle ministrations, than to go and take walks or do other things likely to result in the generation of useful thoughts.

The other factor I failed to consider was heat. In the summer months, Seattle's reputation as a paradise of gloom is put to the lie, and I seem to have a knack for picking places to live that magnify the temperature outside. At a standing desk, one tends to shift one's weight around, so it's consequently more difficult to get anything done when one's whole ability to maintain a consistent train of thought depends on keeping the brain-pan in line with the portable fan. Also: the television again.

Last year I solved the television problem by limiting my non-news programming to the hours before 9AM, which proved wildly successful, at least through late May when most shows ended and the incentive system broke down. The standing desk, however, proved unequal to the summer months in this south-facing Queen Anne apartment, so with invaluable assistance from the little woman I reconfigured everything to allow for a regular sit-down desk, at least where the primary computer is concerned. I feel there's little shame in admitting I'm not the man that Winston was.

Below you'll find the mockups I made beforehand, pretty much to scale. The new version is on the right.

The final configuration was a direct result of the tools at hand. Last month an Omni employee with a streak of benevolent whimsy gave me an OmniGraffle 3 (Pro!) license in a donut shop, and this was the first real use to which I put it. What the designs lack in artistic merit they more than made up in utility.

The desk has a lot of depth to it, so here's a picture:

01:58PM «

Monday, 08/18/03

While on the subject of unknown public servants, I've become more and more taken with Alabama governor Bob Riley. Riley, quoted by the WaPo in a gripping article, told Rotarians "I'm tired of Alabama being first in things that are bad and last in things that are good." Taxes, incredibly enough, are one of the things that are good in this formulation. Riley is trying to take a hammer to Alabama's regressive tax code (which Alabamians pay after less than six months of minimum-wage work in a year, one-quarter of Mississippi's threshold) and rectifying traditional areas of neglect, such as prison overcrowding, education spending, and everything else.

Republican governors from the South who try to overhaul state tax policy usually amount to making deep cuts in whatever won't mean a statistically significant rise in toddler-stabbings. Riley's trying to increase the state's budget, by what passes in Alabama for a lot of money. In California, of course, Alabama's budget hike (twice the size of its deficit) would all fit in a small corner of what Gray Davis is still trying to recover from Enron, El Paso Energy, et al, and would fail to close the budget holes in at least sixteen other states in 2004, by my quick count.

I mention this Riley article because even though it appears there's a good chance he will lose, there are two things about the story that I find hopeful. First, Riley has the granite balls to position the tax initiative as a Christian imperative, which is brilliant, with the added benefit of being true. The WaPo article quotes the editor of The Alabama Baptist that "The Bible is clear that 'to whom much is given, much is required,'" a sentiment present in Sam Raimi's Spider-man movie, but not so much in public discourse. It would be refreshing to see more counter-examples to the far-right Christians giving Christians a bad name.

Second, the national Republican party sees Riley as a threat, and they'd like to skin him alive. The state party chair says, "If this can pass in Alabama, it could be a precedent to attempt it elsewhere, and muddy the anti-tax message." Of course, passage in Alabama will have required worst-in-the-nation educational scores, but that's how Tom DeLay/Grover Norquist Republicans feel about taxes -- even when you're scraping around in last place, "raising taxes is never the answer." There's your anti-tax message. To have breathed such a comment to a national newspaper smacks of overreaching. 08:41PM «

Can you name the current US Surgeon General? I know I could through the Clinton years and back to Koop, but it occurred to me a few days ago that I had no idea who came after Satcher.

It's Richard Carmona, but you've got to dig down one layer into surgeongeneral.gov (end of the first paragraph) to find that out. I'm pretty sure I had no idea. Nor can I name anything he's ever done or said. Short of Google News, can you? 07:24PM «

Friday, 08/15/03

Brent Simmons recently noticed that Safari's toolbar shortcuts are assigned keyboard shortcuts, command-1 through 9.

I too had a recent Safari epiphany. Since I switched, I've been routinely aggravated by Safari's ineptitude in completing URLs typed into the location bar, something IE did aggressively and well. Safari's failings in this area include a lazy assumption that it should autocomplete only from the beginning of any matched text, and a failure to match any text from the HTML title.

I just noticed a day or so ago that I can bring up the weird in-window bookmark display and perform a command-F search on the browser history, matching any part of the URL and the page title. It even supports command-shift-G to locate the previous match. This is delightful, however, I still haven't found a way to bring up my selected page using the keyboard. Only doubleclicking seems to work. 02:49PM «

I know I've fallen behind on the bumppo updates when it's the middle of the month and Paul Krugman is posting more than me.

Today I learned that Sara Gancher lives in Brooklyn and works at the Met. (No, wait, the Met is the museum. I meant the opera.) Despite a few people still in common, I haven't heard boo from her since the tenth grade. This morning she turned up in my radio for a longish interview with Renee Montagne on Morning Edition to discuss her walk home through the blackout. 02:46PM «

Saturday, 08/02/03

There's been this simmering controversy on readily hackable voting machines, since the 2000 election in Florida prompted many state legislatures to trade in their punchcard devices for something with the reassuring capability to beep and whir. To save money, the cheaper electronic voting machines on the market don't produce any hard copy evidence of a vote. Whoever wrote the code running the machine will determine whether votes are counted fairly, or at all.

But of course, most people have no firsthand experience with writing software or designing hardware, so they trust these machines to a vastly greater degree than they deserve. The possibility that voting machines might be compromised, whether through incompetence or design, is too horrible to contemplate. State legislatures are chronically busy and cash-starved, which is the right recipe to try to fix their hanging-chad problems on the cheap.

This story fascinates me because it illustrates a gap in Americans' relationship with technology. The reputation of exit polls is in the doghouse, voting-machine vendors refuse to let their equipment be audited by independent computer-security professionals, and a close election that can't be authoritatively recounted is effectively beyond challenge. I haven't been able to figure out how the general public might come to view insecure voting machines as a threat.

That's why I was so thrilled to see this long NYT story about the unregulated, fly-by-night world of privately-owned ATM machines, friend to money launderer, identity thief, and enterprising workaday criminal alike. It's a great piece of journalism, and it's a wedge issue on voting machines, because Americans take their money seriously.

Banks, of course, would rather lose a few million a year than let the story get out and face a reduction in the billions of dollars they realize in rapacious foreign-ATM fees. If this story or ones like it go wide, the few brave folks working to educate the public about electronic voting machines will get a useful leg up. 02:47PM «

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