• 16:30 loving Hendry v Ding... #

• 20:06 Just found out how much it costs to park near Fenway on a game night. #

• 07:40 @jenbritton Go Jen! Kill the plagiarizers! #
• 07:42 Testing from hellotxt... how many times will this show up in my FB status feed? #
• 08:14 Another post via hellotxt, to see if this shows up in LoudTwitter on LJ. #
• 09:52 Merlin Mann at htxt.it/qBlm "If everything is what you want to do, you're not really doing a thing". That's my problem! #
• 13:21 is finding a cross-compile very stressful. #
• 14:44 has asked for help on that cross-compile. Also, is rediscovering his love for Andrew Higginson. #

I've read a lot about the Clover, the $20K coffee machine that makes a single cup of perfect coffee at a time. This article is good, here is a video of it working, and this (from Slate) is probably the best summary of the appeal. In essence, it's an inverted French Press, where the water is sucked through the grounds rather than the grounds being pushed through the water (and then continuing to sit there at the bottom). The added value is that the Clover lets you control exactly the brew time, the amount of water, and the temperature. That Slate article describes how the author was drawn into a coffee!geek fugue state adjusting one parameter after another in an attempt to draw the ultimate, perfect flavour from a particular (sadly unidentified) bean.

There are only a few Clovers in the world. There were two in New York before Starbucks bought the company that makes them; now there are another 50 in the US, mostly in New England (the barista in one of the Starbucks that has them told me that New England is "a dark roast region" compared to the rest of the States). There are a few in independent coffee shops in Canada, too, mainly Vancouver.

Does it make a difference? I love coffee, but I mainly like French Roast, which is a roast so dark that the roast itself smothers the underlying taste of the beans. The first time I found a Clover in a Starbucks, I ordered the darkest small-batch roast they had (the Bali Batur), and it was a nice dark roast, but it was hard to tell the difference. But then I lucked out: another Starbucks was serving the Guatemala Casi Cielo as both an ordinary drip coffee and a Clover-brew. Trying the two side by side was very instructive. A sip of each without anything added, and a sip of each with milk, made it clear that the Clover brew was slightly better in every way: less bitter, bigger-bodied, and with a taste that used more of the tongue. Adding (brown) sugar did neither cup any favour; both actually tasted thinner and more bitter afterwards. "I can see the difference, but I'm not sure it's worth paying money for," I said to my glamorous companion, and then almost every time after that that I wanted another sip I found my hand going to the Clover brew, and when I'd finished the Clover brew there was still four fifths of the other one left.

So now I'm a convert. I want to do the taste comparison with all the batches they have! I want to take one home and find out how to do the perfect French Roast! Except they take a 30W power supply and cost $11,000!

Here are kind-of my top new songs of the year. "Top new songs" in that I added them to my iTunes library this year, and these are the ones that I listened to most ACCORDING TO SCIENCE (iTunes play count), rather than the ones I would include on an end-of-list if I was choosing freely and just wanted to look cool, which fortunately I don't, that burden has been lifted.

"Kind-of" in that:

• Only one song from a given album!
• I felt sorry for songs that were added at the end of the year and didn't get enough chances for plays, so this is actually the top 12 from the whole year plus the top 6 from the second half of the year plus the top 3 from the last quarter of the year, minus overlaps.
• Minus songs that were on my friends' end-of-year compilations last year.
• I'd had some songs previously on CD but only imported them into iTunes this year, so that kind of feels like cheating. BUT I INCLUDED THEM ANYWAY.
• And plus a couple of songs that I bounced a couple of places up the list because I actually did want to look cool, because that burden has not actually been fully lifted, sorry.

Where possible I've included links to YouTube videos of the songs, but not embedded them (post too big!).

Let me know if you'd like a copy of the MP3s. Here's to 2009!

This year's Doctor Who Christmas Special got good reactions overall, but I have to say I didn't love it. A persistent flaw in Russell T Davies's Doctor Who has been to have stories with two strands, the emo!strand and the action!strand, and to have them barely meet (see The Doctor's Daughter, School Reunion, Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead, etc). The Next Doctor was perhaps the worst example to date; once David Morrissey's question was answered he lost all agency as a character, reduced to leading the cheering. You'd hope that the Doctor's influence would raise a character's awareness of their own worth (see how Vira's story goes in The Ark In Space, for an example from OldWho); instead, David Morrissey had to stand by and watch and the Doctor was the one who had to engage in a desperate race against time to rescue David Morrissey's child before he was forced to sing "Where is Love?".

So a bit of a missed opportunity. A shame, because the visuals were so great – the CyberKing striding across London, popping and steaming, was a great moment. And a shame because the Cybermen, particularly the new, mainly-converted Cybermen, provide ample material for a dark-side exploration of the question that David Morrissey could have explored on the light side: Things have changed; how do I reconcile who I think I am now with who I think I used to be?

"Fun but not good" said episkopos, and that pretty much sums it up.

EMLW just took me by the hand, said "Pee", took me up to the bathroom, got me to take her trousers and nappy off and lift her on to the (grownup) toilet bowl, and then sat there till she peed. Then she wiped herself off, flushed the loo, and got me to put her nappy and trousers back on. Then we went downstairs and told mum.

I am every inch the proud dad.

So, say what you like about the Doctor Who casting announcement, but it's not an unconfident move.

( spoilers obv though I'm not sure exactly what is being spoiled )

Best post/comment combo I've seen to date:

• ed_zeppelin
  , posting from 1973: ZOMG! Barry Letts has cast some old tramp from a building site as the Doctor! We're all doomed!
• danosan
  : "course it doesn't mean he's definitely going to be good either, quantum baker waveform could still collapse to colin state."

How true that is.

As a follow-up to New Year's Resolution 4, I've been looking into setting up a Wiki site to aggregate information about vehicular communications security. My major requirements are:

1. Must be hosted.
2. Must support both public (world-viewable) and private (only viewable to (specific) logged in members) pages. (The motivations for this are: (a) I may want to include private notes on who my contacts are within vendors, etc; (b) I may need to draft and redraft a page in private before I'm happy to make it public.) 
   • Pages must also be whitelist-lockable against edits (as far as I can tell this is pretty much standard).
3. Producing a front page that looks like a blog (including having an RSS feed) should be straightforward (or at least clearly documented)
4. Must be pay for storage (or pay for max no of pages or some equivalent) rather than pay per user (the idea is that this will be a public site and may end up with a long tail of users who each do only a small number of edits).

Nice-to-haves:

1. Comments / Discussion forums. (Since a Wiki is in a sense a discussion forum, this may seem unnecessary, but I find the append-only nature of discussion forums is sufficiently different from the standard Wiki approach that it's worth calling out separately).
2. User / IP address edit blocking.
3. Site export in a standard Wiki markup in case the service goes under
4. • ... or option to host Wiki myself in extremis, ie service is available in both hosted and software form (though if the service goes under and I can't get support for the software I'm not sure how useful this will be).
5. Widely-used and apparently successful to reduce the risk of (2).

Surprisingly, I haven't found anything that fits the bill exactly. Next post: what I've looked at and what I've ended up going with.

(BTW, this entry was written with Semagic; first impression is that I'd like Windows Live Writer's look and feel with Semagic's feature set, but we'll see how it goes).

1. Eat a little less.
2. Exercise a little more

1. Blog every book I read.
• Write a blog post at least once a week anyway.
2. Get better at one of these things: swimming, dancing, reading fast, public speaking.
• Decide which by Jan 30.
3. Get better at deciding between desirable things.
4. Start a site about vehicular communications security. Over time, make it definitive.

One of these things is not exactly like the others.

Q. What's EMLW's favourite part of a ship?
A. The POOP deck.

Q. Why is EMLW patriotic?
A. Because she supports our POOPS.

Q. What is EMLW's favourite play?
A. She POOPS to Conquer.

Q. POOP?
A. Yes, poop. Poop.
Q. ...
A. POOP.

This is fondly remembered by fandom, currently rated 14th best of the classic series on the Doctor Who dynamic rankings; on the other hand, the now-authoritative nwhyte (who nevertheless gave this DVD to me for Christmas, for which many thanks) is notoriously unimpressed with this one, to the extent that he ended up on Ben Aaronovich's "list".

On this watching, my first since it was first transmitted, I still liked it, but not as much as I'd hoped to. There's a lot of good performances, especially by the little girl (and especially when she's not talking – her eerie smiles and her physicality in the last scene with Ace are astonishing). Cliched though a possessed kid now is, I think this may actually be the first use of the idea in classic Doctor Who (unless you count Turlough, which I don't think you have to). The use of natural light and shadow is very striking, the visual effects rock, the stunts are great, the battle scenes genuinely feel martial (in comparison to, for example, Warriors of the Deep) and there is of course *that* Episode 1 cliffhanger. The idea that you could directly acknowledge issues like racism, rather than addressing them obliquely using a character who was mocked because his head looked like a banana, was radical. And, of course, "It's 5.15 and time for Doc-".

On the other hand, the story is full of characters, but a lot of them are very sketchily drawn and there are no journeys for any of them. The Doctor has a plan and the story is simply a complication. Nothing that anyone does affects the fact that the Daleks are already doomed, and the theme that the dialogue thinks is the point of the story – what happens to you when you hate the Other, even if the Other is almost the same as you are – is irrelevant to the resolution of the plot, which basically revolves around the Doctor being smart. As such, although things definitely get cooler for the fen as the story goes on, there isn't a sense that the stakes are rising – the action gets bigger but the focus wanders.

So it's not so much a coherent story, more a throughline with a series of brilliant baubles hanging off it, put in to delight the fans more than anything. Why does the little girl look so much like Davros from behind? Why does Davros look like the Emperor Dalek from TV 21? For the round of applause on the reveal and nothing more. And what a round of applause! But when it dies away there's silence.

Sylvester McCoy (who as usual can't do anger or delight (imagine Tom Baker delivering the lines to the Group Captain in Episode 1!), or any movement without making it look like comedy, but does introspective surprisingly well (imagine, if you can bear it, Colin Baker in the cafe scene in Episode 2)) and Sophie Aldred give an entertaining and sympathetic commentary, focussing on the bloopers and physical discomfort and the effort they made to make other actors feel welcome. But at the end, where commentators traditionally go "That was actually quite a good one, wasn't it?", they seem to find it hard to find the right words.

I'm using Windows Live Writer to compose posts at the moment. Here's what I'm finding.

GOOD:

• You can have multiple drafts on the go at one time.
• WYSIWYG editing is pretty nice
• With the LiveJournal User Plugin it can do LJ user tags. But see BAD!

BAD:

• No support for several LJ-specific things:
• It can't get the link for previous posts
• It can't read tags. (I was hoping I'd be able to import all my incomplete, unpublished posts from the LJ server, which are all tagged "private" and "draft". No dice).
• Doesn't play well with lj user or lj-cut tags. It really wants to put lj user tags on a different line and inside a <div> tag of their own, and if you read a post back from the blog it seems to lose the lj user tag.
• Doesn't seem to be able to write tags either. It can put tags in an entry, but they then translate to LJ user interests.
• No complaints other than the LJ-specific ones. I haven't got the upload-to-Flickr-and-simultaneously-blog-it plugin to work yet, but I haven't really tried.

Overall, I'll keep using it. The ability to have multiple drafts on the go at the same time outweighs any kludginess. The only pain is having to add tags manually afterwards. This is probably why I haven't tagged an entry since October…

Why do people keep telling me to honour soldiers? Why is admiration for the military so strongly and frequently expressed, even by leftish bloggers ("Americans love and respect the men and women who volunteer for military service under our flag")? Why do I think this is wrong? Why do I react so strongly against it?

The strength of the reaction comes, I think, from the fact that (as artw noted), being exhorted to honour soldiers is often fundamentally linked to the most emotional, primitive side of nationalism. It's a worldview that sees a single country as the outpost of correct values, surrounded by implacable and unpersuadable enemies who can only be deterred or destroyed and who want (and realistically hope) to see the country in question brought to its knees. It's a worldview that thinks the most important question to ask is (at 3:15) "Do you want us to win?", rather than "What's the best possible outcome?".

Both this demonization of the other and this focus of virtue in one country are alien to me. So alien that I can't argue against them; both leave me unable to say anything other than "Stop thinking that!". (Maybe that's why I get so worked up; I'm frustrated by my inability to be articulate in response.)

In principle, you could choose to honour the soldiers without nationalist intent. But choosing to honour the fighters, rather than the ideals and the society fought for, elevates the fighting above everything else. It casts the world as a zero sum game, where there are necessarily winners and losers; it makes fighting to destroy something, rather than cooperation to improve things, the highest goal. It makes the most important thing about your house be the fence you've put around it, not the place it provides to meet your family and friends.

So that's point one, the link to nationalism.

But in addition I think joining the military is often simply a bad decision. It's bad both morally and practically. Morally, soldiers have signed up to kill people if they're told to, and that seems to me to be fundamentally shameful, even if the job is sometimes necessary. Soldiers suffer, yes, but they also inflict suffering, and in most developed societies these days this is a job they have freely chosen. You shouldn't honour soldiers without also noting that they have chosen to do something that is essentially wrong.

Practically, there are simply too many soldiers. Soldiers are the only profession for which for every one who you're glad is doing their job, there is pretty much by definition one who you wish wasn't doing it. Contrast with: nurses; software developers; car mechanics; mothers; fathers. Or, more relevantly, diplomats; trade envoys; international businesspeople. Or: firemen. The police. Paramedics. The desire to serve your country is not in itself honourable; in so far as military service is inspired by a desire to serve your country, it's aligned with the broader interests of humanity only by coincidence. Almost everyone who has signed up to be a soldier could probably find a better way of making things better for their loved ones and countrymen. The mere fact that a decision leads to personal hardship does not mean it was a good decision, or an honourable decision, or a decision to be honoured. Sometimes decisions that lead to personal hardship are simply ill-advised.

Many people who serve in the military are personally admirable. I wish they would use their energies in a way that was more admirable too. I choose instead to honour nurses, and engineers, and architects, and people who make deals, and those who advance rather than destroying the common good of humanity.

This is a short and very funny book, lent to me by the estimable Dr. ASK in order to prove a philosophical point about what books you should keep (answer: this one) and what ones you should get rid of (answer: the others). It's a series of two- and three-page sketches, some of which you may already know from the New Yorker such as this one:

A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.

DAD: O.K.

GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.

DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.

UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.

DAD: We all are.

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.

…

The guy is 24 and very funny. This makes me happy and jealous. He also posts excerpts from his new book on CollegeHumor.com, if you want to be made happy and jealous too.

Schopenhauer, "On the Suffering of the World".

I signed up for BlogaPenguinClassic.co.uk because surely everyone has time to read an review an eighty-page book in the six weeks following May 1? But no, no they don't. And now I have to review this book or risk experiencing some of the suffering of the world myself.

So: this is a compilation of Schopenhauer's philosophical writings, selected by an uncredited editor and published without any notes to give historical, philosophical, or personal context. Schopenhauer believes life is essentially one long round of suffering, ultimately disappointing; that ideas Platonically represent Things; that "human desires [that bring about suffering] … must be originally and in their essence sinful and reprehensible"; that women are "… [kind of rubbish]"; and that thinking for yourself, rather than just reading, is very important.

Of these assertions, I disagree with varying degrees of passion with all but the last one. The central quote supporting the first assertion, attractively presented on the cover, is:

A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.

But this is just wrong. The animal being eaten is (probably) much more miserable than the animal eating is happy; but there are many animals that are neither eating others nor being eaten. If there are a lot of them, they don't have to be very happy each to result in an overall balance of pain and enjoyment. The statement simply doesn't test the assertion that it claims to test. One could excuse Schopenhauer by saying the statement is meant to be a rhetorical flourish, not a proof. But the problem is that all the book is like this; and either all the book has to be excused in this way, which leaves no actual argument in the sense of a statement supported by evidence, or at some point it has to be held to some standards of rigour which I don't think it lives up to.

I disagree with (my understanding, perhaps caricatured of) the concept of Platonic ideal: many new things get thought all the time, and if they each correspond to underlying ideals then the universe of ideals seems so cluttered and difficult to navigate as to likely be useless. It seems far more likely that abstract concepts invented by people are just that, concepts, and that although they have more or less power their power comes from their practical usefulness (either technological, or in developing more abstract concepts) rather than from their correspondence to an "ideal". The idea that human desires that cause suffering must be in their essence sinful and reprehensible (a) only makes sense if you believe that things have an "essence" at all, which, as stated, I consider dubious and (b) seems to ignore that desires can be directed for good as well as harm; why not argue that any human desire that causes pleasure must be in its essence good and uplifting? His ideas about women, on the other hand, seem best addressed by straightforward mockery.

So, coming to this without prior exposure to Schopenhauer, and without detailed knowledge of his place in the history of philosophy, I found this disappointing. I love reading about ethics, happiness, and ways to live a good life and live it well, but I found this interesting mainly as something to push back against, and not very stimulating even at that. For someone who believes in ideals, Schopenhauer seems to write very much about his own perspective. I can see how it might have inspired later literature, up to and including the existentialists. It's stylishly written and with great energy. But essentially it's a series of justifications for Schopenhauer's existing prejudices, not an examination of them.

A Soldier's Christmas

by Michael Marks
The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.

The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.
My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,
But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.

Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.
A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.

"What are you doing?" I asked without fear,
"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"
For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts.. .

To the window that danced with a warm fire's light
Then he sighed and he said "Its really all right,
I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night."
"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,
That separates you from the darkest of times.

No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My Gramps died at ' Pearl on a day in December,"
Then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of ' Nam ',
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.

I've not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white, and blue... an American flag.
I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home.

I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.
I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother...
Who stand at the front against any and all,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall."

" So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright,
Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."
"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,
"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you've done,
For being away from your wife and your son."

Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
"Just tell us you love us, and never forget.
To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone,
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.
For when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled.
Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us."

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Hooray! Off to Mexico for Christmas, unlikely to post for a week or so…

This year, I've got a lot of my new music from Indiefeed, a genius little idea. On each of about seven channels (Indie, Modern Alt, Electronica, Dance, Blues, Hip-Hop, poetry (really) and so on) it does one song per podcast and 3-4 podcasts a week. Each song is introduced by a DJ and the last 30 seconds of the podcast consist of the same DJ reading whatever information about the band they've seen fit to send him. It's friendly and low-key and indie-spirited, and in general I like the songs at least as much as I'd expect to like good songs of that genre. And it's free!

And yet I find IndieFeed a bit mysterious. Who is IndieFeed? Who are all the different DJs? How do they choose the tracks? How do they make money, or do they?

For such a popular podcast (I've seen the figure 70,000 subscribers mentioned, though I can't track down where), IndieFeed is curiously unwritten about. The best information I can find is in this Washington City Paper article: IndieFeed is Chris MacDonald from Washington DC and some friends from all over the US, they do it because they love it, and, perhaps most importantly, they restrict themselves to non-RIAA bands. This is why you haven't heard of most of the bands before (with some exceptions: Cake, American Music Club, Elliott Smith, Cornelius, They Might Be Giants). It's also why IndieFeed, unlike most other music podcasts, is unlikely ever to be shut down. And it's free! Subscribe now.