Oh no! We might have to learn to amuse ourselfes!

Clearly someone at the FCC made an error when thinking about the change to digital TV. Apparently even with the required converter box, lots of TVs show crappy pixelated pictures.

Obviously, folks who have been happily paying nothing for TV and getting fair pictures for years are going to be perturbed. Still, the tone of the complaints makes it sound like the government is cutting off water.

I'm no "Kill your TV" guy, but seriously, it's just TV. Listen to your radio for news then go outside and run and jump and skip and play. TV mostly disappoints after all, doesn't it?

I am a slow-ass writer

This weekend has been largely written-off to proper work. A project I was working on sort of as a lark became increasingly important as it evolved, so now I'm working on the weekend to get it ready by Monday.

At the same time, as long as I'm spending a great deal more time close to home than I'd anticipated, I'm also catching up on some writing I owe MSNBC. My clever friend at MSNBC talked about how they pay pretty well for freelance stuff, but I'm starting to think that's because she can write witty stuff in about a tenth the time it takes me. I've been laboring over this piece for ages and I'm still not happy with it.

I guess I'll continue to rely on coding to earn my keep - at least until I can write an interesting piece in 4 hours and be assured of more demand.

Going snowboarding

Well, I'm headed up to Whitetail today for some snowboarding and reflection.

I hope not to freeze, and I hope to get back in time to finish some work. Still, skipping it isn't an option yet.

Ah the new year

Well, I went to MI and passed a great xmas with the family. New Years was spent in Boston with some buddies, a couple of whom I'm working with on GiftGaff. (Hi guys! The code's coming along nicely and I'm right now avoiding it for a moment because all the PHP errors have me down ever since I turned them on to root out whatever's eating a whole chunk of page). It was good to see everyone face to face, especially including Eric and Erica my hosts.

The only bummer was being literally the only single straight person at the party at the stroke of midnight. It might have been worse to be the only single gay guy though, so perhaps I didn't get the worst of it.

I started a job on Monday and it's in Annapolis which might almost just as well be Pluto for the commute. Jesus. Christ. The new commute, among other things, is finally turning me into a full-on misanthrope. Look, the rules are, you drive on the right until you come up on someone going slower in front of you. Then you move to the left and pass. If there's no one to your right, you go back the hell over there. Rinse and repeat.

If we all do it, the emergent property might be that I get to goddamned work without having an embolism so urgent I choke on it. Also, your signals inform people where you're driving your stupid car. It's not goddamned rocket surgery.

On the plus side, it's been raining to fill the pound lo these last couple of days and commuters' common sense seems to be made of spun sugar. No, wait, on the plus side, when I did get to work today, I learned about some neat-o technologies for using twitter. How neat-o? Perhaps neat-o enough to make me want to use it more. That's pretty good really. Soon all my (not very many) followers will get twitter spam from some magpie jerks.

If nothing from that previous paragraph save the oblique reference to raining cats and dogs made sense to you, count yourself lucky. Seriously, I'm becoming a carpenter or an ascetic or something. I can see the appeal to going offline altogether. Maybe I'll just walk the Earth like Caine from Kung-Fu. I do, after all, know kung-fu, which is more than could be said for David Carradine when he did the show.

Okay, back to coding and then to bed so I can wake up an hour ago to assure a manageable commute.

Home for the holidays

Drove from D.C. to MI today. Didn't get nearly as much reading on PHP done as I would have liked, but did just finish installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on my laptop.

Still have to enable PHP extensions in the config file of the server and set up some virtual hosts. If I remember correctly, that means finding or creating a host file somewhere in my computer. And, er, sacrificing a virgin?

I'm glad to know how to do all this stuff, but I'm thinking perhaps I should learn about sports or something so I can talk to people. :)

Either way, I'm pooped. It's nice to be surrounded by family. Here's hoping T-- gets in okay tomorrow from the West coast.

My oddest impulse purchase to date

I saw this as I was checking out of Best Buy today.

Hi, welcome to my wassailing party. Oh, look, is that mistletoe you're standing under? I guess we should get it on.

Someone had discarded it on a shelf and I picked it up to see what it was. Clearly I couldn't put it down, just in case.

It turns out that most of the songs are delivered pretty straight, although God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen might be my new favorite song ever. With Idol's growl it sounds subversively aggressive.

A remembrance of things buttery

Today for breakfast I enjoyed a large cuppa tea and milk accompanied by two honest-to-God crumpets. The crumpets were vectors for a simply irresponsible quantity of butter and a much more carefully controlled dose of Marmite.

Marmite, for the uninitiated, is a bread-spread made from the yeasty detritus left over after brewing has been done. If I'm honest, it doesn't taste even so palatable as that description might lead you to expect. It's sort of like salty tar. If you grew up on it though, it's heaven.

Marmite's been easy to come by for years in the U.S., but I had no idea how close I lived to proper crumpets. Trader Joe's crumpets are the real thing. The first bite took me right back to my childhood in London and almost erased the trauma I suffered from biting into my first "English" muffin.

Thank you Trader Joe's.