novelgazer

Two Times tables

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:04:22 PST

Illustrious employer got a nod in the NYTimes yesterday, but more importantly (and timely), I can't wait to figure out who my presidential hair twin is! Ladies model also available.

Okay, one article and one table. And I guess the table is more of a chart. Maybe "Hair to the Chief" would have been a better title?

Iron Chef Gar-sieze

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:44:19 PST

We're fast fans of Iron Chef America, and I recognize the anime cultural connection, and enjoy the aesthetic of excess and bravado that makes it successful*, but has anyone seen the latest promo? The one for Iron Chef Garces' debut? TOO. MUCH. STROBE.

I don't know if they did a Next Iron Chef Production Assistant series to select the person who cut this thing together, but I try to only swallow tongue at delicatessens and taco shops. We can't even protect ourselves by looking away from the screen or closing our eyes, it seems to reverberate off our walls and into our skulls. Thanks for new episodes, but seriously, knock it off.

*The strategy of making a burned plate of garbage palatable by covering it with foie, gold leaf, and shaved truffles will forever be known as the Iron Chef Gambit.

Don't know why...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:44:45 PST

Three cheers for Panera Bread — provider of hassle-free, strip mall wifi par excellence! Compelled to ask, though, why the world needs a lite-jazz version of Nora Jones’ “Don't Know Why” arranged for saxophone and harmonica. The original was too hard core? Wait — now they're giving the same treatment to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Someone may be having some fun with me, I suspect. Oh well, baguette sandwich with a side of baguette means all is forgiven!

Anyway, I find myself with a bit of time to catch up on a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy etc. and so forth, here just past the end of the season. (Full disclosure: our tree is still trimmed and burning.) Our schedules wouldn't allow a trip to Pennsylvania, which was a disappointment, but otherwise had a wonderful holiday, including singing at the Christmas eve service, a nice long visit from Nicole, and a grand Sunday-after-Christmas luncheon thrown by Sue and Paul on the occasion of Annie’s guest sermon at St. Luke’s.

But I see you are impatient, so on with the presents (in link form)!

First is a gift from Paul to the whole internet: How we spent Christmas morning.
Annie and I also cameoed in a couple (less musical) Christmas videos thanks to a gift from my folks.
One of our photos and Annie’s eyewitness testimony were used in a French 24 news story about one of our favorite Slovak Christmas traditions.
Meanwhile, Slovakia has been handing out presents of its own.

I’m particularly thankful for my pocketwatch from Annie (more on that later) and we're both very grateful for the ornaments from our parents, which made our first Christmas home so special.

Update: Hey, you in the corner! Who eats the soup and leaves behind the bread bowl?

You brought myrrh?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:52:24 PST

In the midst of a frustrating morning tracking down information on the Flare visualization library, I suggested to Matt that he should spend his 20% making a "It's Not Just You" button for the Google toolbar. You know, when a site is inexplicably unavailable, and you think to yourself, is the site down, or is it just me? The second thing I do after refreshing the page a dozen times is to google the url, to make sure I've got it spelled right, see if anyone has mentioned it's gone down, and check the cache for the information I was after. Matt realized we could just use translate.google.com for the same functionality. I tried it out, and it was not just me. Of course, this is the situation 99% of the time, I'm sure, but now I can feel like I've actually done something about it.

In other Matt news -- actually, very other Matt news, as this is about a different Matt -- Matt Stanley, a friend of mine from high school has a really cool audio/photo story on the dying art of rail hunting. Not to be confused with trainspotting. By all means check it out, as well as the rest of his blog.

Finally, cnet presents an object lesson in the pitfalls of web accessibility by including a picture of a table of data. In an article on web accessibility.

None too soon

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:01:32 PDT

Via Slashdot: IT Security Breaches Soar in 2009

Rest easy, North America, I'm back in town.

Bacon blogjam

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:24:15 PDT

A job search can sometimes lead to a bit of a paranoid blogjam -- could this post be too controversial for potential employers?

Well, who could object to these links? The first, found via Chow combines two of my passions (cooking and typesetting) to pose the question of the ages: Cheese or Font?

The second also combines two passions, this time cooking and bacon. It's Homesick Texan's Bacon Jam! Enjoy!

...They're all going the wrong way!

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:54:13 PDT

Greetings from beautiful Streetsboro, OH where we are nestled in the gentle and affordable embrace of the Econolodge. Just off I-80, the Ohio Turnpike, which earlier today treated us to this road terror:

The classic oncoming UPS truck. Not pictured: Sean white-knuckling the steering wheel of our new Yaris before realizing the UPS truck was being towed.

Earlier in the trip, passing a herd of cattle, Annie poked up her head and called out to them a sprightly "Meeeeeeyah!" Mad cows, apparently.

You'd just laugh if they'd named it Dachshund

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:58:41 PDT

Thanks to the whims of fortune, I write you from one of the business lounges of the Frankfort Airport, where Annie and I are sipping Kingsley tonic and eating (okay, slurping) beef consommé. The path of the missionary is fraught with hardship, but we are sustained by the Spirit. And beef consommé.

We volunteered to be bumped from a bulgingly overbooked flight, in return for some compensation and a 6 hour airport mini-vacation -- we've toured 3 of the 5 terminals so far, and security has guaranteed that our carry-on is very, very, very, safe (gratis!). In about 2 hours, we'll hop into business class seats and snooze our way to Chicago. See you soon!

Radio Free Europe

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:26:03 PDT

Time to return the cable modem to Chello, so we'll be incommunicado until we touch down in Chicago (unless there's wifi at the hotel tonight, I suppose.) If you need to get ahold of us, uhm... sorry? If it's an emergency, you can call us int'l on our cells until about 11am Eastern:

Annie
Sean

Packing a lunch

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 08:13:27 PDT

This is as much to share with you, the home viewer, as a reminder for future-me, finished-packing-and-cleaning-me: Mark Bittman, nytimes.com's The Minimalist offers this 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics. Even on the hottest days (which we've mostly been spared here in Bratislava this summer) my first resort is to fire up the oven, which is pretty impractical. This looks like it might be a nice cold dinner resource, even if some of the prep is hot.

Now, Rome, on the other hand — the only thing baking there was us! Ridiculously hot there. Hopefully we'll get a chance to post some anecdotes when we're back in the States next week.

Back to the oven with me — cleaning only.

The tenor of conversation

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:38:20 PDT

So all the underwhelming new features in Opera 10 — Turbo, visual tabs, new skin — have been a cover for the big show -- Opera Unite, their “reinvention” of the web that turns the browser into a no hassle web server to share pictures, music, chat, anything. Setting security concerns aside, it makes sense. If we've got near server-class hardware on the desktop, and server-caliber net access, why not bypass the middleman (or person, or computer) and act as our own servers? (N.B. Like Turbo and Opera Link, all roads lead to an opera.com account.) Opera is framing it as using our existing computer resources to add to the robustness of the web.

It's interesting to me that this is happening just as Google is introducing Wave, which in a very real way reinvents email using everything we've learned in the past 40 years or so (yes, email is that old) about communication online. Instead of using mail servers to just shuffle messages around between computers, Wave turns each message into a sort of hub for all manner of communication and collaboration, like live chat, annotation, media sharing, etc. The message, and all the rest of the associated content, seems to exist on a server somewhere, accessible webmail- or Google-apps style, although a desktop Wave client wouldn't be unimaginable. Google's planning on making it an open protocol, which should ease adoption. (If Opera's hunch is correct, maybe we'll all be our own Wave servers sooner or later. In which case, IPv6 better hurry up.)

While Opera, on the other hand, has driven browser innovation in the past, that's usually been as a function of new features, not a whole new web paradigm. If their widget library in comparison to Firefox's plugin community is any indication, I'm not certain they actually have the juice to make this happen.

I do not regret not calling this post “Something to sing about”

Final report

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:43:12 PDT

The air feels laden, like I can almost smell the sea. I'm writing a grammar exam, listening to Koko Taylor; she'll rain on my parade.

ISS astronauts get Trek?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:10:39 PDT

I can't even watch SNL online here. Thanks, Hulu. Jerks. (via New York Times.)

I can read, despite the expense of such a habit here (in English, at least.) In between lesson planning, grading*, and mispronouncing Slovak, I've managed to squeeze in a few very enjoyable reads, mostly a couple guilty pagefuls at a time on trams, in the bathroom, instead of cleaning the kitchen. Time to live up to my nom de blogge, I reckon, and give my (brief) impressions. Here's the first... more to come later.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns
As you may have seen next door, Auds and Curt came for a visit, and left not only footprints, but also delicious homemade candy and some English(!) reading. I was pretty liberal with my consumption of the candy, but I'm rationing the reading a bit more carefully; there are always flights and train rides in our future. I started with TDKR, exactly the stuff I needed to retreat from British Literature. I was surprised to realize I've never actually read the thing, even though -- just by reputation -- it was probably hugely influential on my expectations for Batman comics and movies.

I remember being introduced to the Dark Knight in the backyard of one of Matt's friends -- Doug Bright, maybe? My Super Powers/Superfriends Batman archetype didn't stand a chance. Batman beats Superman? Robin is a girl? The Batmobile is a tank? Awesome! Finally getting around to reading it after all this time, I worried that the genuine article wouldn't hold up to the reputation, but I tore through it with the same excitement I had as a kid. And, not having to worry about breaking the binding on Doug's copy? Awesome!

By the way, The George Lucas Educational Foundation says: Archduke Franz Ferdinand shot first.

*I do grade pretty regularly, despite what my students and my personal expectations might tell you.

No, not Perseus, the other guy

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:59:16 PDT

Travelling from Vienna to İsmir on Turkish Air on Monday was an unexpected delight, but I'll admit I was a bit skeptical about our journey from there to İstanbul today flying on Pegasus Air. After careful consideration of the flight plan showed we'd be nowhere in the vicinity of Mt. Olympus, though, Annie and I boarded happily (careful to fasten our safety belts.) It's just as well — after 3 days tramping (and traipsing) around the 7 churches of Revelation, ~~Ephesus~~, Ἔφεσος, the tomb of St. John, etc., I slept soundly through the (reportedly) uneventful 45-minute flight.

So, here we are in a pretty swank hotel in İstanbul, full to the brim with delicious homemade Iranian food from members of a local church, and ready to turn in for the night to get another early start tomorrow.

POST SCRIPTVM: Photo is from a different trip, but it's really getting into the spirit of the thing.

Who you calling Turkey, Turkey?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:07:10 PDT

Well, don't call us in Turkey, I expect that might be expensive. But we have landed — safely, soundly, and exceptionally well-fedly thanks to Turkish Air— in İzmir, Turkey for the AICEM-EIEIO conference. I think I got that name right. I might be a bit punchy from the travel.

Where's that t-shirt option when you need it?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:53:22 PDT

I don't get it — who could object to this plan?

-from cnn.com

Feature feature

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:00:24 PDT

This is my Andy Rooney post for the year, where I complain about some newfangled technology.

Lots of folks have been chattering about the new iPod Shuffle, pointing out the great strides they've made applying Moore's law to ~~DRM~~ authentication chips. What they haven't mentioned, at least not loudly enough for me to notice, was Apple's brilliant decision to leverage cooler-than-cool voice menu technology, apparently licensed at a discount from Visa Fraud Prevention Services. “I believe you said Barry Manilow. Is that correct? Hold on, I'll connect you.” Cutting edge stuff, there. I'm not saying it's not useful, just that it's not an innovation (1st generation iPods had it) and, more to the point, it's kinda boring.

In other lame lock-in technology news, Opera, my favorite browser, is really losing my confidence. Their two biggest recent features, Opera Link and Opera Turbo fall kinda short of the groundbreaking standard they set with mouse gestures, speed dial, the intellegent address bar, etc. The former is a bright idea — a way to synchronize your browser preferences all over the web — that I'd probably like better as flexible, open format rather than as a razor for a My Opera account. The latter idea was short-sighted when Google, AOL, and Netscape introduced it back in '04 or '05: a proxy server that will pre-fetch, compress, and prioritize web traffic to your browser. It was a smart technology for Opera to apply to mobile devices, but adapting it for the desktop, where broadband speeds are (reluctantly but steadily) increasing, seems like a waste of resources that could be focused on real innovation. Maybe useful for cellular broadband users?

They're making cool strides on the back end; Opera 10 will support web fonts, SVG fonts, cool opacity stuff... they already have a tech preview release of their next, next rendering engine. Also, they've brought Jon Hicks in to work on the UI, which suggests it'll be more than just a re-skin. The latest alpha preview just didn't whelm me, I guess.

It's like that scene in William Gibson's Count Zero, where they quantify the research output of a scientist, and extrapolate the graph of his future breakthroughs. I'm projecting a plateau.

Greek to us

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:16:53 PST

We'd known to expect really inexpensive, comfortable rail travel when
we came to Europe, but one thing that's surprised us is the
super-discounted flights that are often available via Sky Europe --
sure you have to get out and push now and again, and passengers are
expected to bring their own floatation devices, but those small
inconveniences are worth the price. And so it happened that 11 of the
American teachers here found ourselves whisked away to Greece for
spring break on a wing and a prayer.

On arrival, the group mostly scattered to different cities, meeting up
along the road as our paths crossed. Annie and I took a vote and
decided to travel together: we landed in the hoity-toity port of
Thessaloniki, stayed one night and one day, then were on a train for
Kalambaka, a small town at the foot of a cluster of monasteries called
Meteora, built on high natural pillars of rock like those found in
Monument National Park and Roadrunner cartoons. After a long day of
hiking, several million photographs each more beautiful than the last,
and a solid night's sleep, we started the 9 hour journey to Nafplio
(Greece's answer to Stone Harbor, NJ) by train, suburban rail, taxi,
and bus. Had a wonderful time on the beach, eating seafood, and
exploring the shops, then on to Athens, where fatigue limited our
photography, but not our fun.

Annie's put our photos up on Flickr -- each city has its own set linked above, but
we really did take a massive amount of photos, so Annie's also
assembled a little highlight reel of the whole vacation if you want to
see some of our favorites and make our long story short. Let's see --
a picture is worth 1000 words, times 650 pictures...

Full disclosure: I totally sent this as an email to our family first, and then recycled it as a blog. Pllllbbbbbth!

Everything's belated this week -- or last week, I guess

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:49:47 PST

Tonight Annie looked me in the eyes, caressed my forehead, and reminded me that I will crumble away to dust someday. I smiled a little and was sad a little, then sat right down in my pew and was sad that I wouldn't have a moment of reflection after the hymn and grumpy that I can't sing along without hymnals anymore like I could at mass, and naturally, naturally was just missing the point. Christmas is the titular holiday for us in the public eye, but Lent and Easter are really the big show. I talked with another parishoner and we decided these themes of failure and death, forgiveness and resurection have a special pull for us and a lot of Christians, partly because the season is intentionally introspective and partly because Hallmark hasn't tried to foist "Remember you are dust, buster!" greeting cards on us yet. Lent is a time in the church year when we're invited to contemplate grief and sadness and repentence, but not to wallow. Let's abstain from wallowing, Sean, hmm?

Anyway, David's sermon was really spot on, but as often happens, one line in particular set my mind wandering. Speaking of ash as symbol of ruin and destruction, he said something like,

In the English language, we have a phrase, “Where there's smoke, there is fire.” But it would also be true to say, “Where there's ash, there was fire.”

I'd been thinking about the Landry/Kinghorn song Abba! Father (emphasis in original) and how those earthen vessels are related to our creation from and destiny as ash, clay, earth. The imposition comes with the reminder, “Remember, you are dust and to dust you shall return.” My attention was drawn to what must be in between -- the fire. Ash is constant, but ash cannot fuel fire; life is a divine fire perpetuated by God. The reminder of my mortality became also a reminder of my miraculous existence.

Belated Out-of-office Message

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:11:29 PST

Sorry if you've tried to get ahold of Annie or me the past week; we just stepped out for a gyro. More to come as we upload.

Pay for the whole seat, you only need the edge

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 07:24:52 PST

So, in the midst my fever-dream of grading and squirrelbears, I guess I neglected to wrap things up on the gas crisis here in Slovakia and parts thereabout. On the 18th, we got some relief when RWE Transgas in the Czech Republic essentially reversed polarity on the Bratstvo — or Brotherhood — gas pipeline normally used to deliver gas to them. Roughly two days later Russia and Ukraine reached some sort of agreement and gas began to flow through standard channels once more.

I can't speak for places like Bulgaria, which had a much worse time of things, but the short-term interruption in daily life here in Slovakia was fairly minimal; mostly just another topic of conversation. The reserves held like a nervously exhaled breath, and only a couple large companies had to reduce their output while waiting it out. Households, hospitals, schools, small businesses, all went on as usual. Long-term effects on the economy? Relations with Ukraine and Russia? I don't know. Also, in the wake of it all, the Slovak government debated a bill on official gas emergency measures, should the issue arise again, say same time next year. Not entirely certain how that all ended up.

My personal reaction was unexpected. I wrote this late one night in the midst of it, and wasn't sure if I should post it:

It's wierd, right? It's not like we're in freaking Gaza or something, or even in Bulgaria, where there're no gas reserves. And it is cold out there, but not even Philadelphia-cold, where it was -14 Celsius or something today. And I know they've got people without gas, too.

But this kind of scarcity is new to me. I'm terribly comfortable with the idea that poor people can't get access to the basics of a reasonable standard of living. But this? You can't even wave money at it to make it go away. It's a global inequity in the distribution of the resources necessary for survival. It's a political scarcity. As a USian, I'm not used to being the third party/collatoral damage in international politics, and maybe that's why I find this so unsettling.

I can't imagine how histrionic I'd have been if they actually turned our gas off.

Internet exclusive

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:45:32 PST

Squirrels are like little bears. Little bears with tails. Also, I have the flu. Here are some pictures of a kitten and a squirrel who are friends.

For extremely large values of "without delay"

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 13:19:42 PST

Into day 10 or 11 or something without gas supply from Russia, Slovakia seems to be holding steady. Residences, schools and hospitals are still unrestricted, although big businesses like US Steel Košice and the KIA plant in Žilina have reduced output or shut down to accomidate their gas caps. Despite an EU negotiated deal to allow the monitored flow of gas through Ukraine that both sides agreed to, the gas hasn't been restored -- I'm not entirely clear on what happened there. For a time, Russia was saying the flow had resumed and Ukraine was saying it hadn't. Then I maybe heard that Ukraine claimed the pressure was too low to be operable, and Russia claimed this was because Ukraine was siphoning off gas. At any rate, that plan seems to be put on the back burner, as far as the media is concerned. The back burner, of course, will not light without gas.

Prime Minister Fico met with Ukrainian and Russian PMs Yulia Tymoshenko and Vladimir Putin, to suggest some options -- either a gas swap from Ukraine's reserves, with Russia replenishing their supply in equal measure, or a more complicated plan using another pipeline, the Yamal pipeline which normally supplies gas to Germany via Belarus and Poland. The former would be preferable, and is the one Slovakia is pushing for at the moment. Russia is philosophically amenable to the idea, provided Ukraine goes first.

CNN is reporting that Russia claims the gas will resume within the next few days -- not really certain where that fits into things.

Meanwhile, Slovakia's preparing to bring back online a reactor block of the Jaslovské Bohunice V1 nuke plant, which was only shut down a few weeks ago as a condition for EU entry. Should they power it back up, they'll be in violation of treaty, one which Austria is particularly invested in, but they're willing to take responsibility for that should it become necessary. Slovak Foreign Affairs Minister Ján Kubiš met with them to fill them in on the details and assure the safety and tranparency of the operation.

On our end of things, our local folks have started scoping out spots for a grand sleepover, should it become necessary, and floating ideas about electric heaters or Viennese vacations. Gas reserves should hold out for a number of weeks yet, and the electrical grid (other than the backup generators) isn't reliant on it, so no one is terribly worried, but it's better to be prepared than to get burnt later. Frozen, I guess.

Victor who now?

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:19:01 PST

I have never been a particularly patient reader of history; anything less than the most engaging narrative arc and I completely wilt. And of course, historians would probably argue I should be wary of getting drawn in by such compelling stories, keeping in mind their authors.

But I want to be knowledgeable about history. What I manage to consume and retain always fascinates me, and the human details often surprise me.

So I was quite pleased to find (via Language Log) this Languagehat notice of an upcoming text by one of their commenters called The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Central Europe: 19th and 20th Centuries. From the table of contents and the excerpts Languagehat presents, this seems like an ideal source for me to pick up the recent, fairly complicated, political history of Slovakia and its neighbors by relating it to a field I'm much better with.

Of course, it's a college textbook, so it runs about $175 on Amazon on sale, so I'll have to settle for the 60 page excerpt available online. And, bringing this to my attention has earned Languagehat an overdue place on my RSS subscriptions. (If you'd care to purchase a copy of the book for me, I'd be happy to award you your own place on that list as well!)

Is it just me...

noreply@blogger.com (novelgazer) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 14:00:19 PST

...or does Google have another new favicon all of a sudden?

UPDATE: And of course, the google blog has already beaten me to the punch. Time for bed, I think.