Live from Austin!

The house has returned to normal Minnesotan levels. Our guests have left me with a cold, so I’m probably going to spend most of the day in bed.

It’s raining. It has been raining all afternoon. I’m not complaining that it’s raining, we need it.

I only started driving about 2½ years ago. As a result, I still find it genuinely pleasurable to be in a car when it’s raining, even if I’m sitting in traffic.

Slow moving traffic? Luxury. Try not moving, spending 45 minutes standing in the wind and rain waiting for a bus that’s supposed to run every 20 minutes. Poor visibility? Try cycling in a downpour, blinking from the rain in your eyes and squinting through the droplets on your glasses.

Driving in the rain leads to much the same pleasure I get from sitting looking out the window at the rain. It’s the pleasure of knowing that I’m not out there in it. A simple pleasure, but a good one.

Guardian:

More people in Britain think religion causes harm than believe it does good, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. It shows that an overwhelming majority see religion as a cause of division and tension — greatly outnumbering the smaller majority who also believe that it can be a force for good.

Well, that’ll give Richard Dawkins a merry Christmas.

First we had an election landslide against the Republicans, in which the Iraq war was the #1 concern of voters.

Then we had an Iraq Study Group. It was described by the mainstream media as “bipartisan”. Here’s what “bipartisan” actually means:

• Chairman James A. Baker III—Chief of Staff, Reagan; Secretary of State, Bush I.
• Co-chairman Lee H. Hamilton—allegedly a Democrat. As chair of a previous Select Committee, he chose not to investigate Reagan or Bush I for their roles in the Iran-Contra scandal. He now sits on Bush II’s Homeland Security Advisory Council.
• Lawrence S. Eagleburger—Secretary of State, Bush I.
• Edwin S. Meese III—US Attorney General, Reagan.
• Alan K. Simpson—Republican Senate whip, Reagan and Bush I.
• Sandra Day O’Connor—ex Supreme Court justice appointed by Reagan.
• William J. Perry—Secretary of Defense, Clinton; hence in charge of a decade of bombing of Iraq.
• Charles S. Robb—the only Democrat to vote in favor of every item in the Republican “Contract with America”.
• Leon Panetta—Democrat, but ex-Republican. Chief of Staff, Clinton, worked with Perry on killing tens of thousands of Iraqi children.
• Vernon Jordan—an actual no-holds-barred Democrat?

So, not exactly a bunch of pinko French-speaking peaceniks. Everyone seemed to expect that their report would recommend deeper engagement. Bush said that the report would give the country an “opportunity to find common ground”. But when the actual report was read, it said that the Iraq war is an ongoing disaster and that we should try to pull out:

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no path that can guarantee success [...]

Our most important recommendations call for new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts in Iraq and the region, and a change in the primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly. We believe that these two recommendations are equally important and reinforce one another.

And the result? The neocons turn on Baker and denounce him, and Bush opts for more troops for the long term fight. Allegedly sane Republican John McCain calls for more troops as well, in Afghanistan too.

Senior military staff are skeptical. There’s also the problem of where to get the actual troops, since the army is described as being at breaking point and in need of additional assistance from the National Guard and Reserves (who, remember, were supposed to be a strategic reserve to deal with crises within the USA).

But the big question I’m left wondering is: what would it take to get Bush and crew to listen? I can understand them ignoring intelligence reports, ignoring testimony from Iraqi defectors, ignoring millions of protesters marching in the streets, and so on. It’s harder to imagine how they can widen their ignorance until they’re even prepared to ignore and denounce their own people.

We’ve been out getting the food for Christmas. The supermarket sells corn for squirrels—it even has a picture of a squirrel on the bag. I also picked up a big $3 bag of sunflower seeds, it’ll be their Christmas gift. The man standing behind us in the checkout queue was a squirrel skeptic. “You’re feeding rats!”

We got a fake tree this year, after Mythbusters covered how much damage a tree can do if it catches on fire and rothko decided she didn’t want a real tree in the house after all. Safety aside, there’s something to be said for not having needles everywhere, and having branches strong enough to hold up weightier ornaments. You can get Christmas tree smell as scented candles, and probably as an aerosol too.

The big excitement, though, is that we managed to get some mince pies this year. I don’t think I’d seen any since we visited my family for Christmas several years ago.

No Wii for Christmas. I tried stores, I tried online, no luck. I even tried the Amazon customers vote, which said I had a slightly better chance of winning the chance to buy a Wii than I had of getting hemorrhoids, which kinda makes me feel better that that sort of probability is by no means a sure thing.

There’s an article by Donald Norman that has been stirring up controversy online. Whereas last time I thought he was wrong, this time I think he’s right—mostly.

In general, he’s correct that people don’t buy the simple, well-designed stuff. Instead, they buy the stuff that looks like it has the most features; and they tell what that is by looking at how many settings and controls it has.

Not always, though. The best exception that proves the rule is the now almost ubiquitous iPod.

Continue reading »

It’ll be a service for downloading your voicemail to your iPod, and not a piece of new hardware.

As you may have gathered if you subscribe to my Flickr stream, the infamous Nikon scanner decided it didn’t want to scan any more. Or rather, it would scan, but the scan head wouldn’t move, resulting in some interesting modern art.

I took the case off and looked for any obviously fixable mechanical problems, but couldn’t see any. It would probably be possible to get it working by disassembling the mechanism, but I’m not that mechanically oriented.

It’s not like I’ve abused the scanner, and it has only had light residential use. So that’s definitely the last Nikon product I will ever buy.

I zipped off to the web and did a quick search for reviews of film scanners. Turns out that technology has advanced (as usual). Canon now have dual-mode flatbed/film scanners that are so good that they have stopped making old-style dedicated film scanners. Their finest model is also less than half the price the Nikon was back when it was new.

So, I bought a Canon CanoScan 9950F from Newegg. It arrived yesterday. It’s clearly a pro grade scanner; it feels far more hefty and resilient than any other flatbed I’ve used. It also has two killer features.

The first is that you can load it with up to 30 images (5 strips of negatives) in one go, and it’ll churn away for an hour or so and scan them all automatically. Major time saver.

The second is that it has an adaptor for larger film sizes, including 120 and 645. So I’ll be able to scan my dad’s prize winning 645 photos. It’s also higher resolution than the Nikon, with better bit depth.

It also does all the usual flatbed stuff, including turning documents into PDF with OCR. I use this to turn interesting magazine articles into PDFs for reference.

So, how do the results look? At least as good as the Nikon, and the software is miles better. The FARE auto-fix stuff even seems to do a better job than VueScan, though the sharpening is a bit over-zealous (but can be turned off).

I don’t know which is more amazing—that the UK didn’t repeal the Witchcraft Act of 1735 until 1951, or that a woman was convicted of witchcraft in 1944.

I now have a Wii…

…component video cable.

Now all I need is the actual console. I figured the cable would be the tougher piece to get, because they were only available by direct order from Nintendo, but it turns out the console is still near impossible to find in Austin.