It's the 100th anniversary of the 1911 census of the United Kingdom, which was taken on the night of Sunday, April 2nd. Ireland was still part of the UK and hence was included in the census.

The census results are online. The Irish results are freely browsable. The UK results cost money.

Three of my grandparents were born in the 18 months following the census.

George Clery

My maternal grandfather, George Victor Clery, was born on March 30th, 1900. He died on March 3rd, 1965, twelve days before I was born. I am called George after him and Vincent after my father.

Generations of Clerys worked for the Munster & Leinster bank, which became Allied Irish Bank in the late 1960s.

Clery census form

Ethna MacDonagh

My mother's mother, Ethna MacDonagh, was born on April 28th, 1911. Her parents had moved from Ireland to London a few years earlier. Her father Francis was a journalist and died, I think, when she was a young woman. Her mother Hannah died when I was 8. Hannah was one of the first women to graduate from an Irish university.

Patrick Reilly

Patrick “Paddy” Reilly was born on June 3rd, 1911, to a well-to-do farmer, near Kells, Co. Meath. He was one of 10 children; nine survived. The last brother, Richard “Dick” O'Reilly, lives near Vancouver.

Paddy studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin but never finished. He spent most of his career selling tyres for Goodyear.

Reilly census form

Kathleen Taylor

My father's mother, Kathleen Taylor, was born on August 1st, 1912. Her father was later a supplier to the Irish Dept of Defence, I believe. “Gam”, as we called her, was always secretive about her age and would be horrified that I've told you. She dyed her hair black until the day she died, six years ago.

Taylor census form

Twelve years ago today, Emma and I met face-to-face for the first time. We had been talking on the phone for about three weeks after I had answered her personals ad in The Stranger. We might have met a little sooner, but she was busy meeting the other guys who had responded, and I was undergoing the IIS 4 deathmarch at Microsoft.

We were both nervous and we each responded characteristically. Emma babbled; I said very little. She told me later that she thought that she had scared me off. She hadn't, though. We had already talked several times on the phone and she had been less nervous. I liked her and I called her back and soon we went out on another date.

By the end of the year, we were infatuated with each other. By mid-January, I was spending most of my nights at her place in Ballard. In February, I bought her a new bed to replace her broken-down old mattress—some self interest was involved, admittedly. A couple of months later, after she had been laid off from an office job, I lent her money to attend some software testing classes. Within a year, her pay had doubled—one of the best investments I ever made. In August 2008, we rented a house together in Wallingford. We were engaged a couple of weeks after our first anniversary. That Christmas, we visited Ireland together for the first time.

The following years were less hectic but no less enjoyable. Here's to several dozen more!

In Football, dogfighting, and brain damage, Malcolm Gladwell writes of the rather startling findings concerning brain damage that American footballers sustain over their careers.

The constant butting of heads leads to an enormously high rate of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.), which has symptoms like Alzheimer's. It's not just the concussions that cause it, but all the subconcussive contact. It's almost as dangerous to one's long-term health as boxing.

I grew up hating rugby and transferred that hatred to American football. I have no time for the game, which I find violent and repellent, nor for the jock culture that surrounds it.

Regardless of my feelings about football, Gladwell's article (as so many New Yorker pieces do) makes for compelling reading. Though I found the digressions about dogfighting to be strained and irrelevant.

Two months after our memorial for Frank Maloney, we took the ferry over to Vashon Island to scatter his ashes. It was a beautiful September day, sunny but not too hot, and a 20-minute ferry ride was most pleasant.

Kim and Holly fed us lunch at their place and we all fell in love with their six rescue kittens. We drove to a secluded beach and each of us scattered a teaspoon of Frank's ashes upon the waters. We sat there for a while and talked and wandered. Then, back to Holly and Kim's for cake and coffee.

I know that Frank would have thoroughly enjoyed the day: the fine weather, the ferry ride, the beach, and the food. He would have reveled in the kittens and shone in the company of his friends, who continue to miss him.

I took a large number of photos. The best, somewhat edited, are up at Flickr: ferry, kittens, and ashes.

Paying bills always makes me grumpy. More than just the drain on my wallet, it's also the sheer hassle and tedium.

I think it was last year that I finally switched over to using electronic billpay. (I'm not always an early adopter.) The hassle is less and I seldom write checks now.

I'd like to know why electronic payments take days, not milliseconds, to clear. More predatory bank practices, no doubt.

I wrote several checks tonight. For months I had been putting off renewing my membership in various do-gooder organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and GLAAD. Some I wrote checks to, others I used their online forms.

I'm going to be getting a couple of dozen checks in the next few weeks. I'm the treasurer of Freely Speaking Toastmasters and our semi-annual dues are due at World HQ on October 1st. We had to raise our club dues by $5, as we moved our meeting location and now have to pay rent.

I held my annual fundraising barbecue for the AIDS Walk today. Actually, the weather was so wet this morning that we cooked and ate inside.

I am happy to report that thanks to the generosity of my sponsors, I have raised $982 of my original goal of $1000. With three weeks left until the walk, I am predicting success in reaching my goal.

This year is the 23rd anniversary of the Seattle AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed since the Northwest AIDS Walk began. AIDS used to be the unstoppable disease that killed much of a generation of gay men.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs in the Nineties means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1.5 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. LLAA cooks 190,000 fresh meals each year, helps 3500 people, provides case management for 1200 people, provides 1400 people with health insurance support, packs 45,000 grocery bags, and distributes condoms and safe-sex information to high-risk populations.

Donations to the Lifelong AIDS Alliance are down significantly so far in 2009, while the need for their services has grown in this perilous economy. This year's goal is to raise $750,000 and recruit more than 4000 walkers.

I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS. Please help me raise money again for this year's walk on Saturday, September 26th. I aim to raise at least $1000.

You can sponsor me by going to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk. I'm also the captain of the Freely Speaking Toastmasters team. We'd love to have you join us or sponsor us.

Note: Emma and I are having a fundraising barbecue on Sunday, September 6th, noon to 6pm. Email me for more details.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you'll be helping thank you.

My eight-month experiment in daily blogging will go on hiatus for a few days. We fly out tonight and I will have only intermittent Internet access for the next three weeks in Spain and Ireland.

It's possible that I'll write a daily post, but I often won't be able to post immediately.

We're off to Spain and Ireland tomorrow evening, so lots of last-minute preparations tonight. I laid out my clothes on the spare bed on Sunday; Emma picked out hers this evening. I've just paid some bills and I'm transferring files onto the netbook that I'm bringing.

I still have to whittle down the large pile of books that are under consideration. I don't want to run out before we get to Ireland, but I don't want to take too many. Depending on what else is going on, I'll get through a book in a day or two when I'm on vacation. Maybe two books on those long plane flights.

For weeks, Lyn has been telling us about the musical talk that he was going to give today at his UU congregation about Billy Strayhorn, a little-known but talented composer, who collaborated for decades with Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was openly gay in the homophobic decades before Stonewall. That, coupled with his apparent liking for remaining in Ellington's shadow, probably contributed to his obscurity.

Lyn talked about Billy Strayhorn and his life and music for half an hour. He also accompanied Shirley singing some Strayhorn songs on piano, as Linda and Marion played the clarinet and cello. He said that Strayhorn's life gives rise to two questions, Do you know who you really are, and Are you living as that person.

He had been fretting about it beforehand, but it all came out fine.

Lyn, Raven, and Iain came over on Friday night for dinner. We did a little planning for Frank's memorial today and selected some poems.

Emma and I packed up the car and got to Lyn's by noon, which gave us plenty of time to set up. I wore my commemorative Portland motsscon t-shirt, which I know Frank would have gotten a kick out of.

A dozen or so of Frank's friends arrived around 2 o'clock. We chatted for a while waiting for Holly and Kim to arrive after fighting through the crowded ferry system from Vashon Island. Shirley sang You're Not So Easy to Forget, while Lyn accompanied her on the keyboard. We moved outside and I read Black Cats & Broken Gates in the front yard, where it was written.

We carpooled to nearby Seahurst Park, one of Frank's favorite beaches, sat down on some logs and rocks, and reminisced about Frank for more than an hour. We told stories about Frank, how we had met him, his early life, things that we recalled. A common theme was that Frank was a great conversationalist who could discourse eloquently on so many topics. We talked about the love of old movies that he shared with Lyndol, his taste in food, his longtime friendship with Ron Zimmerman of the Herb Farm restaurant. We talked in particular about his being a poet and we read the poems that I had brought.

We went back to the house and ate and drank for a couple of hours. Lyn had stayed up till midnight preparing two of his signature desserts, apples with cookies and a Norwegian pastry. I finally got to meet Holly whom Frank had been telling me about for as long as I had known him. We made a plan to go over to Vashon Island on September 12th to scatter Frank's ashes.

I know Frank would have enjoyed himself immensely if he had been there. A shame he wasn't. Maybe we should celebrate people while they're still alive.

I filled six densely packed barrels with yard waste today, before and after the victory barbecue for the Wild Geese Players. No wonder I'm tired.

Three barrels from the pile of clippings left over from circumcising the camelia tree on Memorial Day weekend, and another three from the big bush that Emma hates in the front rock garden. The latter barely looks pruned at all.

I just sent out the Evite for Frank's memorial on July 5th. If you didn't receive a copy and you'd like to go, let me know.

Next up, choose the poems and music. We may reprise some of those that I read at Toastmasters. Certainly, we should read “How to Eat a Slug”.

Perhaps the most irrefutable sign of middle age for me was getting progressive lenses six months ago.

I had noticed for several months that I was having a little difficulty with smaller print, and a visit to the optometrist confirmed that I needed reading glasses. Now I'm near-sighted and far-sighted, all at the same time.

The new glasses took some getting used to. I had been accustomed to looking through any part of the lens. Now I had to tilt my head downwards rather than simply turn my eyes down, if I wanted to look at the floor, or I'd be looking through the short-distance reading portion.

These lenses are also noticeably heavier than my older glasses. On a couple of occasions, I've had to wear different glasses for a few days, to give a rest to the pressure spots on the bridge of my nose.

ESR writes about Elocutionary Punctuation, distinguishing it from syntactic punctuation. The latter, says he, is the style taught in schools, where the punctuation corresponds to grammatical phrase structure. Elocutionary punctuation treats punctuation as markers of speech cadence and intonation.

I think I fall in this camp. I'm careful about my punctuation, though I can't necessarily articulate why I choose one way over another. If it sounds right in my head, that's the way I go. Even before I started doing staged readings, I paid attention to how my writing would sound, were it read aloud.

While I'm pontificating on punctuation, let me say that I'm a firm proponent of the serial comma—the comma just before the final conjunction in a list, such as “England, Ireland, and Wales”. It wasn't taught in Irish schools when I grew up, but my logical mind requires the symmetry. I also prefer to leave periods outside of quotations that fall at the end of sentences, as you can see two sentences back.

I just posted this message to Frank's favorite newsgroups, soc.motss and rec.arts.movies.past-films.

Frank Maloney was a longtime regular in this newsgroup. After a long illness, he died on January 6th, 2009 at his home.

Some of Frank's friends are helping Lyndol, his partner of more than 30 years, to put together a memorial for Frank. It'll be held near Seattle on the afternoon of July 5th.

Frank was a published poet and we'll be reading some of his poems. But he also spent more than 20 years participating in newsgroups, posted thousands of articles, and made many online friends. It seems fitting for us to read some of his voluminous output.

We'd like your help. If you saved some of Frank's old posts that you found memorable -- touching, witty, erudite, insightful, or even infuriating -- please repost them here or email them to me. If you have some memories of Frank in your own words, we'd like to hear them too.

If you'd like to attend the memorial, let me know. This thread will serve as the online counterpart.

(Posted separately to soc.motss and rec.arts.movies.past-films)

Other people must think I'm a grown up or something. I've been invited to a couple of dinner auctions in the last year. We were invited to one for Choral Arts tonight by one of the primary organizers. Emma was feeling unwell, so I went by myself.

I flat out made a donation and bought some raffle tickets. I also won two modest items in the auction, tickets for Arts West and five voice lessons.

I have little natural aptitude for music. I found it difficult to keep time on a triangle in the class “orchestra” when I was a kid. Songs and music don't stick in my head. I might—might—recognize a piece, but I can't summon it up. Most of all, I have a big hangup about singing. When I was twelve, I was told that I shouldn't sing with the class and I've hardly sung since.

My brother David is a professional actor who has concentrated on singing in the last year. I've meant to take singing lessons for some time. If David can learn to sing, I can learn to croak.

Of all the major American holidays, Memorial Day and Labor Day are the most divorced from their ostensible meanings. To most people—myself included—they are little more than the brackets of summer, three-day weekends of barbecues and sun.

Memorial Day commemorates U.S. men and women who died in military service. I don't think I know anyone who actually observes that, including Emma, a USAF veteran. If I knew some military families, I might think otherwise.

Veterans Day (November 11th) honors all veterans, peacetime or wartime, living or dead. Few adults get Veterans Day off, so it's poorly observed.

Labor Day originated as a parade to exhibit to the public “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations”. That meaning is long gone for most people.

I serve as tech support to my parents, Frank and Lyndol, and a handful of others. I was at Lyn's tonight to find out why he no longer had an Internet connection. I told him when I arrived, "This will take a minute or an hour." Either it was going to be something that I'd spot in a moment or I'd be fighting with it for a while.

I immediately noticed that the network hub was unplugged—and dared to hope that it might be just that simple. It wasn't, of course: the hub had been unplugged during Lyn's own fruitless troubleshooting. I quickly pinpointed that the DSL modem was not connecting and no amount of power-cycling would convince it otherwise. His ISP's support line had closed down for the evening. I left him with a few suggestions on what to tell them. It occurs to me in retrospect that I didn't verify that all cables were correctly plugged in, but I think the real reason is that the modem is configured with Frank's user ID. We transferred the billing to Lyn after Frank died. It seems plausible that the DSL modem needs to be reconfigured with Lyn's credentials.

We came up to Vancouver, BC for the weekend. This morning, we visited the Van Dusen Botanical Garden for the first time. In a relatively small area, they've put together many specialized gardens: rhododendrons, a maze, heathers, redwoods, roses, gingkos, and more. In Seattle terms, it has elements of the Arboretum and the Rhododendron Garden. Well worth a visit, especially on a beautiful May morning.

This afternoon, we drove down to Ladner to visit my great-uncle Dick and his wife Margaret. They moved into a retirement home in March. Dick has visibly failed since we last saw him in September. Margaret remains remarkably spry and fit, but is nearly blind.

Tonight we are off to a party, the proximate excuse for our trip.

Emma turned 50 today. She was a mere (late) thirty-something when I met her.

We had dinner at The Georgian in the classic Fairmont Olympic hotel. Until a few years ago, it was the Four Seasons. The Georgian is in an old-fashioned dining room with soaring ceilings that mutes the conversation. The waiters were attentive and made us feel welcome.

The food is not outrageously expensive—we both chose to have the prix fixe dinner at $49. I had the wine for an additional $20. The presentation was superb and we both enjoyed the food. An asparagus salad, followed by chicken wrapped in apple-smoked bacon, and the black-and-white soufflé. Scallops were an alternative to the chicken, but didn't appeal to either of us.

Happy Birthday, my love.

One week from today, our ninth wedding anniversary.

I mentioned last month that we were refinancing our house. We signed the escrow papers today. Aside from the snafu over which Eastside Starbucks to meet in, it went without a hitch.

The new mortgage kicks in on June 1st.

I took today off and headed north to the Skagit Valley with Emma and Lyndol to see the tulips. It was a glorious spring day, sunny, not too warm, a light breeze. The tulip fields were busy for a weekday; they're completely overrun at the weekends.

We wandered around Tulip Town for an hour, had lunch in La Conner, and headed back to Seattle via Camano Island.

We had intended to take Chuckanut Drive up to Fairhaven, but Emma wasn't feeling well. Some other time. Chuckanut Drive is pretty year round; the tulips are good only for another couple of weeks.

More photos at Flickr.

In Seattle, it is said that moss grows on the north side of the rain. To be sure, moss thrives in the shadier parts of our yard.

On a cold, dry February day, I rented a pressure washer with the intention of scouring the moss from the ground and the flaking paint from the garage walls. Although it was quite effective at removing moss, it made a godawful mess. There were muddy flecks of moss everywhere. Against the flaking paint, it made little impression and I still have to deal with that. I had dealt with perhaps a third of the moss when the pressure washer died. I got a partial refund, but didn't feel like renting another one.

The following weekend, I scraped up more moss with a shovel. Not messy, but not wholly effective either, leaving small, low patches of moss that are starting to return.

Today, I took on the exterior basement stairs. They are always in shade and the moss carpeted the steps. I used an old grill brush that had grown too foul with grease to be used on the grill. It did an excellent job; I've never seen those steps look so clean. The scraper peeled most of the moss off the ground and the brass bristles ripped up the roots with ease.

Bloody hard work, though.

It's been a long, dreary winter in Seattle. After a horrible, wet Saturday, last Sunday was glorious, the first nice day in weeks. Then the cold and rain came back. It snowed on April 1st, for Pete's sake.

And now we have another lovely weekend, with promised highs in the high Sixties tomorrow. I did some yard work today and cleaned the grill and outdoor furniture. We've invited a handful of friends over for dinner tomorrow night.

I love Spring. The winter recedes, the weather grows warmer, the young plants appear, the dormant trees bloom, and all is right with the world.

I dread Spring. My nose itches, it runs, it blocks up, it explodes.

This year, my eyes itch too. A lot. It's really, um, irritating.

Our neighborhood was built in spurts. The brick Tudors, like ours, were built in the 1930s. The houses adjoining mine were built in the years after World War II.

There's a house for sale a few doors down that's very like ours. We snooped around on Sunday during the open house.

Our house was built in 1931; the other, the year before. Ours is slightly deeper, but the floor plans are very similar. Theirs has no eyecatching yellow brick trim. Our kitchen was remodeled in the sixties, taking over part of the next room. Theirs never was and it's tiny. Our basement is half finished and it had a bathroom added in the seventies. Their basement is unfinished. Our dormers upstairs are walk-in closets; their dormers are unfinished attic. Our living room and dining room windows were replaced with picture windows, while they still have leaded panes.

Dark wood trim predominates in their house, the electrical outlets and light switches look like the originals, and the paintwork was shabby. In short, it had changed little in the eight decades since it was built.

Quite an eerie experience, seeing our house much as it started out.

When we bought our house in 2000, our interest rate was about 8.5% on a 30-year loan. A couple of years later, we refinanced it down to 6.875%, which reduced our monthly payments by several hundred dollars.

Today, we signed the paperwork to refinance it again, down to 4.75% over 20 years. That drops our monthly payment by another $300, which is most welcome, as Emma's unemployed.

All of these are fixed-rate mortgages. We're really not fans of adjustable-rate mortgages: too many horror stories about people starting out a low rate and not being able to cope when the rates go up.

We went through the same guy each time, Sanjay Pitroda of MetLife Home Loans in Kirkland.

We drove up to Vancouver today. We'll be here until Tuesday. It's my birthday tomorrow and I have two days of vacation that I have to use by the end of March or lose them, so why not.

I always like Vancouver. It's unequivocally a major city. Vancouver feels more urban than Seattle, where people have only been moving into high-density downtown condos and apartments for a few years.

We're staying at the Sunset Inn and Suites in the West End. We stayed here before. It's relatively cheap, clean, and centrally located. No particular charm either.

Tomorrow, we see my great-uncle Dick and his wife Margaret. They're both 92 and about to move into a retirement center. We'll have a nice dinner in the evening for my birthday.

Ow! Ow! Ow! It's Friday the 13th and I ransomed my car this evening from the shop for over two grand—more than half of it labor. I think I'm in the wrong line of business. Maybe I should be a greasemonkey instead.

The clutch was worn out and the flywheel needed replacing, which required taking out the transmission.

We've only had one other comparable bill with this car and it has over 90,000 miles. We're not doing too badly overall, except that the other bill was late last year.

Feh.

We were watching An Engineer's Guide to Cats on YouTube when I looked out the front window and spotted these two looking in. They climbed up the six-foot gooseberry frames to the windowsill.

Meet Whiskey and Guinness, from next door. They think they own the place. When it's hot in the summer, they've been known to stroll in and wander around our living room—while we're in it.

I left the back door open for a few minutes one Saturday morning, while packing the car. I came back in and found Whiskey just inside the back room. He scarpered when I yelled at him and I slammed the door behind him. It was then that I discovered that Guinness was now locked in. He tore past me, to get out the back door. He couldn't, so he tried to climb up and over the venetian blind. He got to the top before he realized that wasn't going to work either. Down he dropped from the ruined blind and back into the living room with him. I opened the door wide and stamped into the living room from the other side to drive him out.

Cheeky buggers. Almost as cheeky as the racoon who climbed up the gooseberry frames one night. We looked out to see a face staring in at us, startling us. We stepped outside with a flashlight and yelled at him, but he was quite reluctant to go.

Zits. Somehow all those ads on TV for acne cream never quite tell you that zits continue after your teenage years.

This post was brought to you by the small but annoying pimple that appeared yesterday. Feh!

I knew three of my grandparents; they all died after I reached adulthood. My mother's father, George Victor Clery, died 12 days before I was born, on March 3rd, 1965. I was to be named Vincent after my father, [Charles] Vincent Reilly. Instead, I was christened George Vincent Reilly. I was the first grandchild for both the Clerys and the Reillys. I think I must have been a welcome distraction.

Ironically, my parents had gotten married on his birthday, March 30th, the previous year, and he didn't live to celebrate their first anniversary. The timing was partly in his honor and partly because it was Easter Monday. Catholics were not allowed to marry in Lent then.

I only know the man by repute. He worked, like many in his family, in a bank. His word was law in his household, but my mother adored him. He was very sociable: he'd invite clients to lunch in the bankhouse at the drop of a hat and my grandmother would have to figure out to feed them. His mother was told that he'd not live beyond infancy and his health was poor all of his life, but he was no hypochondriac. I see something of him in my uncles, Dick and Gabriel. Certainly the face and the moustache; also the gruffness.

George Clery, 1900-1965.

A few years ago, after watching one too many whodunnit TV mysterys, I coined my

Law of Economy of Characters

The killer is innocuously introduced in the first 20 minutes

In real life, the killer may not be known until late in the investigation—if ever.

In a TV mystery, any non-recurring character who gets more than a few lines has to be a potential suspect—to the audience. The character is not there gratuitously. Their salary is being paid for a reason.

It's not universally true, but it works more often than not. It's less true in books, where throwaway characters are easy to introduce.

Googling around, I found the following, attributed to Roger Ebert:

Ebert's Law of Conservation of Characters

Any main character whose purpose is not readily apparent must be more important than he or she seems

I'm in good company.

Aaron Swartz has a moderately interesting piece on productivity and procrastination.

We all procrastinate. I certainly procrastinate.

Sometimes my procrastination is tantamount to making sure that my pencils are very, very sharp. More often, I find myself surfing the web, free associating off in random directions. There's no end to the fascinating distractions.

In lesser cases, I procrastinate because I'm bored or not fully engaged in what I'm doing.

When I have a more severe case, I think fear is the root cause. I don't really know how to proceed, I don't really understand what it is that I'm supposed to be doing, and I don't really want to come to grips with it. And so I don't. My fear of the pain dissuades me.

When I finally do get over the hump, quite often, I'll find myself engaged in the problem and have difficulty tearing myself away. I develop a sense of accomplishment about the problem. At best, I find myself in a state of flow.

The key to my getting started seems to be to find some small, manageable piece that I can accomplish. The momentum gets me on to the next piece and then the next.

Easier said than done, alas.

My talented wife got back today from four days at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in Tacoma. As you can see from Emma's Flickr page, she's knit a lot of beautiful pieces.

I'm hoping she will revive her dormant blog and write more about some of her projects. She does have some writeups at Ravelry (Facebook for knitters) under her username Emma, but that's only visible to members.

I talked to my mother this afternoon. She's still in Dublin, helping Michelle out with Harry. My father went back to Cape Town in mid-January to enjoy the golf and the South African summer. My parents spend several months a year there.

They have a small cottage in Hout Bay, in a residential complex. The buildings are terraced together. The other night, the cottage two doors down caught fire and the woman inside died. My father slept through the whole commotion forty feet from his bedroom, and knew nothing about it until the next day.

We knew he was a sound sleeper—and a heavy snorer—but this tops everything.

What a month!

It opened well, when my nephew Harry was born. Frank died a day later. A cold dragged me down for over a week.

Last week's Obama inauguration cheered me up. He's off to a strong start. My story about attending the Bush Sr. inauguration omitted noting that 20 years ago this month, I emigrated from Ireland. More on that in some future posts.

Then there were the layoffs. Emma lost her contract job last week, primarily from having missed a lot of work due to ill health. And on Monday, some other friends were laid off, as were tens of thousands all around the country.

And my gout has flared up, though in a mild way.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, I attended Bush Senior's Inauguration. By accident.

I was on my first solo trip to the United States, having arrived in New York the previous week. There I had purchased a 30-day unlimited standby ticket with Delta. It cost me only $400, as I could produce my round-the-world ticket.

For no particularly good reason, I decided to start the 30 days with a trip to Washington DC. There were museums there and it was nearby.

I hadn't been paying close attention to the news, and it was only when I got to Washington that I realized that George H.W. Bush's inauguration was to be be held the next day. Even so, I had no difficulty finding a bed at the Youth Hostel. It was the biggest deal in town, so naturally I went.

In practice, this meant standing on a grassy knoll on (I think) Pennsylvania Avenue for several hours, waiting for Bush's motorcade to pass. It was bitterly cold and no one around me seemed to be enjoying themselves much. My only real memory of the day is watching the enormous flag across the street, fluttering in the wind. The flag hung vertically; I think it would have lain like a crumpled rag had it been flown horizontally. Eventually, Bush's car crawled past, eliciting some cheers from the chilled crowd. I left then, to go somewhere warmer.

I had little feel for Bush Senior at the time. Reagan had not been popular in Europe. We thought him a dangerous cowboy, likely to provoke a nuclear war with the Russians. I thought Bush was probably little better, but I wasn't particularly engaged in U.S. politics at the time.

In retrospect, of course, he seems marvelous compared to the other President Bush.

(Before I wrote this post, I assumed that the inauguration was always held on the third Tuesday of January. Actually, it's been held on January 20th since 1937.)

I seldom get bad colds, but I caught one on the plane back from Ireland, and it's left me drained of energy for the last ten days. Jet lag and Frank's death surely contributed too. Feh!

Maybe I'll be up to cycling into work tomorrow. Between the snow, being in Ireland for two weeks, and this cold, it's been almost a month since I last rode in.

I've appointed myself as Frank's electronic executor. He had an active online life, spending over 20 years in Usenet newsgroups and selling hundreds of pieces of vintage costume jewelry on eBay.

We had a dry run for this in October, after he'd been in hospital for a month. The need to deal with his eBay customers had grown pressing. Lyndol is not technically savvy and was unable to handle it. I had to work out how to get into his eBay, PayPal, and email accounts. Fortunately, I was able to phone Frank in the hospital and ask him. Unfortunately, he had forgotten many of the passwords and I had to use various password reset features.

I dug into the enormous pile of costume jewelry and worked out what needed to be sent to who, packaged it up for Lyn to send, and sent email to his customers, explaining Frank's hospitalization.

When he came home to hospice care, he sent out email to his online friends telling them. Thoughtfully, he set up an email folder called “friends to notify”, which I used on Tuesday. Less thoughtfully, he continued buying and selling jewelry on eBay until he could no longer sit at the computer. I spent several hours yesterday closing up the business. I had to refund a couple of buyers because I couldn't find their purchases.

Mindful of the password problem for my own heirs, I recorded a CD with my KeePass database several weeks ago. I put it inside a sealed envelope with the master password written out, and I put the envelope into the firesafe. I don't actually know most of my passwords, as they're “strong”, random passwords generated by KeePass. Most of them are unimportant, from websites that I registered with long ago.

The password database, in itself, is not enough. I need to draw up some instructions on what's important and a list of policies and bank accounts, and put that somewhere safe too. Then update it periodically.

You should too. Some poor bastard will think more kindly of you someday.

On Wednesday, I accompanied Lyn to the People's Memorial Funeral Cooperative on Capitol Hill to make the arrangement for Frank's cremation.

Years ago, I read Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death Revisited and it left me with an even lower opinion of the funeral industry than I already had.

I had never made any funeral arrangements before. It turned out to be both painless and inexpensive. The funeral director sat down with us and gathered information for the death certificate that the doctor was unable to provide, such as parents' names and other personal details. Initially, we put down “Software Documenter” as Frank's occupation—his final job had been a ten-year stint at Microsoft as a documentation assistant—but when we were proofreading the printout, I suggested “poet”. And so it was. Frank published one book of poetry, How to Eat a Slug, and I know he'd rather be remembered as a poet than a Microsoft peon.

The cost was $800, as Frank was a member of the non-profit People's Memorial co-op. It would have been a couple of hundred more otherwise. I asked how much it would have cost at a commercial mortuary, and she told us that a basic package at a well-known funeral home a few blocks away started out at $3200. Ouch!

We were unable to view Frank's body as it was already at the crematorium in Kent, and that would have cost $150 extra to set up.

I also arranged a brief death notice in this week's Seattle Gay News.

(Aside: the URL for People's Memorial is http://www.funerals.coop. I wasn't even aware that there was a .coop TLD, but I learned that it was created with other new TLDs, such as .biz, .info, and .name, in 2002.)

My nephew's name is Harold Mark Bowles, to be known as Harry. I assume the Mark is after my brother. No idea about the Harold/Harry.

I said before that my mother was very excited at becoming a grandmother. Here's the proof: take a look at the huge smile on her face.

On Christmas Day, she was trying to decide what her new title was to be. She was really pleased at becoming a granny, but not at all eager to be known as “Granny”. She tried out “Nan Et” (Et for Ethna), which we promptly turned into “Nanette”. “Gran Et” was even worse: with a strong Dublin accent it becomes “Granite”. She has decided that she will be known as “Nana”.

My grandmother Reilly was known to us all as “Gam”. It's my fault. I was the oldest grandchild and I couldn't say “Gran”, so I called her “Gam”—and it stuck. Almost. Some of our cousins heretically called her “Gan”. I was definitively wrong, dammit!

I wrote three weeks ago, that Frank's time was limited. He died yesterday at 3am of liver failure. He had been unconscious since Saturday, and he had been moved to a hospital bed in his living room on Thursday.

I was at a coffee shop near work yesterday morning when Emma called me to relay the news from Lyndol. We hurried over there and spent the rest of the day with him, helping out as various friends came over.

Lyn is doing as well as can be expected. He's sad, occasionally weepy, and sometimes a little manic. I think he's relieved that Frank's ordeal is over. After 32 years together, it's going to leave a huge void in his life.

I'm sad too, of course, but I'm coping well, if a little numb. Emma's more obviously upset. We're going back over there in a little while. I'm to close up Frank's eBay business and to accompany Lyndol to the mortuary. We expect to be back in the office tomorrow.

Frank had thoughtfully left a folder in his email called "friends to notify", a task that I took care of yesterday. I announced it too on his Facebook homepage. Over the next few days, I'll write up a longer appreciation of Frank and post it to his two favorite newsgroups, soc.motss and rec.arts.movies.past-films.

When I have time, I intend to put together some selections from his many postings. For now, a tiny sampler from Jess Anderson.

When I announced my nephew's birth on Monday, I didn't say where I had been when I learned the news. Lyn had invited another couple and Emma and me over on Sunday for a meal. We sat in the living room, talking, while Frank gurgled slightly on oxygen in the corner. It was somewhat surreal but Lyn desperately needed the company of friends.

My father's call came, I took it in the kitchen, then came back and told Emma that she now had a nephew. We toasted the baby. The circle of life: birth and death. As Eric said when I told him the next day, if it was in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.

I didn't really say goodbye to Frank then—I didn't expect the end to come quite so soon—and I regret it. The last time that I saw him conscious was the night of his anniversary when we brought dessert back to his house. He was still fully in command of his faculties then as his newsgroup posts on Christmas Day demonstrate.

As the social worker told us yesterday, Kubler-Ross's work was all about letting people die in character, and Frank very much died in character. I found it remarkable how little it seemed to bother him these last few months at home that his death was imminent. He seemed to get stronger after he came home from the hospital to home hospice care. He took as keen an interest in life as he ever did. I only saw him down once.

Frank Maloney, much loved and much missed.

David B just emailed me a handful of cameraphone photos of his wife and son. I like this one the best.

[Edit: This one is actually from my brother David, not my brother-in-law David. I'm telling you, one of them's got to go: it's just too confusing.]

At 12:44am Monday (Irish Time), Michelle gave birth to a 9lb 8oz boy. Mother and son are healthy but exhausted. I'm not sure quite how long the actual labor lasted; but I think she started late on Saturday.

My nephew is, as yet, unnamed. David and Michelle have yet to find a boy's name that both of them really like. Under Irish law, they have three months to do so, but Michelle hopes to pick a name within a few days at most.

It's now two weeks since Michelle's due date. She went into Holles Street Maternity Hospital this morning to have her baby induced. No progress yet. That kid doesn't want to come out! It may be Sunday before it's born.

Ironically, the Wild Geese Players read the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses last summer, which takes place in Holles Street. Bloom goes to visit his friend Mina Purefoy, who's been three days in labor, and meets up with a crowd of drunken medical students and Stephen Dedalus. Between them, they manage to recapitulate the development of the English language.

We fly back to Seattle in the morning, so we certainly won't see the baby before we leave. We'll be back at the end of July to help my parents celebrate their 70th birthdays, and we'll meet the kid then.

When my parents visited me in September, I bought them a second laptop and an external drive for backup. One laptop stays in Dublin, the other in Cape Town where they spend much of their year. Both laptops are in Dublin with me at present, so that I can clean them up and get them in sync. (I had to remove some very obscure registry settings to get one DVD drive working again. <sigh/>)

Their backup needs are simple. Both of them have web-based email at Yahoo!. The only personal data on either computer is photos. Inevitably the photos are out of sync between the two machines.

The WD Passport drive came with WDSync, which syncs specified data, encrypted with AES, between the computer and the drive. Different computers can have different profiles on the drive. If data is removed from the computer, WDSync will remove it from the drive.

I felt that this was overkill for my parents and I didn't like that the photos were not readily visible on the drive.

So I just wrote a simple batch file that treecopies the photos folder from the laptop to the external drive, and vice versa. They just need to run the batch file periodically, to back up new photos, and bring the drive with them when they travel to and from Cape Town, so that the other laptop can be updated.

2008 closes, leaving economic wreckage in its wake. Personally and professionally, it's been a good year. At the national level, it's been both a very good year and a disastrous one. Obama's historic victory is offset by the imploding economy.

My health remains good, I'm a little fitter than I was a year ago. I've notched up a few personal milestones, such as receiving my Competent Communicator award at Toastmasters and becoming the secretary of Freely Speaking Toastmasters.

My friends and family are, mostly, doing well. My sister is (still!) on the verge of having her first child. Emma's health is never great: she will have surgery to remove abdominal adhesions in a few weeks. And Frank is in slow decline.

I like my job at Cozi. I've learned a lot in the last year and I've seen our products improve enormously since the beginning of the year. I think we're well placed to ride out the downturn.

That downturn worries me. The economy was unsound and badly needs restructuring, but a lot of people are going to get hurt before it can be fixed.

I still have high hopes for Obama. I wonder how much he can achieve in that initial honeymoon. He certainly can't fix everything that's broken.

2009? We live in interesting times.

Michelle and her husband David B† came over for dinner. Her baby is now nine days overdue and she's more than ready to give birth.

† Not to be confused with the other David, our brother, who is currently living at my parents' house in Dublin.

We had lunch with Alan and Sheena in Dundrum and met their new baby.

It's been very hard to hook up with my old friends here. We landed seven days ago and the only other meet up was a couple of pints with Jimmy on Monday. They're (almost) all middle-aged, mortgaged, married, and bechilded, and otherwise busy with their own lives. We are to have lunch with Hilary tomorrow and to get together with Austin on Tuesday, but the rest of the remaining week looks socially arid.

I have completely lost count of how many hats and mittens, mostly for babies, that Emma has knitted since she got here. Prodigious quantities, to be sure.

My friends Frank and Lyndol met 32 years ago today, the day they celebrate as their anniversary. For several years, Emma and I have brought them out for dinner on this date. We also celebrate Lyn's birthday, which falls next week.

Frank's health has been poor for some years, but it's grown worse this year. He spent six weeks in hospital in September and October. He's home now, but he's in hospice care.

Naturally, we try to see him often, since he rarely feels strong enough to leave the house, even in a wheelchair. We almost always find him in good form, glad to see us and ready with his stories.

He's somewhat stronger than when he left hospital. They've been provided with a hospital bed as part of the hospice care, but he's still sleeping in his own bed while he can.

We had hoped to take them to Szmania's in Magnolia for dinner tonight. It didn't work out as planned, alas. Lyndol showed up alone: Frank had felt too weak to come. In truth, he was also worried about the icy roads and getting about.

The three of us ate dinner together. The pheasant was particularly good. It was a fine meal, but not the same without Frank.

We brought the dessert back to their house, surprising Frank who was very happy to see us.

I would wish them many more years together, but it's not to be.

Lots of new babies around.

Dilip in North Carolina emailed me the other day and mentioned the recent birth of his daughter, Anuragini. And Alan in Dublin emailed me this morning, to tell me of the birth of his daughter, Beth.

My sister, Michelle Bowles, is due to give birth on the 19th to the first Reilly grandchild. We arrive in Dublin on the 21st. First babies tend to be born late, so we may get there before the baby does. She and David have elected not to learn the gender of the baby, so I addressed their Christmas card to "Michelle, David, and TBD".

It seems like all of my mother's friends have had grandchildren over the last twenty years. It's certain that she has had a bad case of grandchild envy and that she's very excited to become a grandmother.

We've gone high-def over the last month. First, Emma bought a 42" 1080p plasma Panasonic HDTV to replace the 32" CRT TV in our living room. Although it's wider, it's not overwhelming, as the slender box sits further back. The picture's pretty good—at least when you give it a good signal.

To take advantage of it required a cascade of upgrades. Our old TiVo served us well for eight years; appointment TV has long been alien to us. It's disconnected now, replaced the other day by a DirecTV Plus DVR and a new satellite dish. I had heard bad things about the older DirecTV DVRs, but I have no complaints about this one yet.

I spent a year at Atlas working on advertising for Video on Demand, but until we got the new DVR, I had never seen VOD in anyone's home. VOD gives us an additional, changing catalog of programs and films that we can download when we choose, rather than having to record them when they're broadcast. I drilled a hole in the floor and ran a 50 foot Ethernet cable into Emma's basement office to get an Internet connection.

After the DVR arrived, I felt compelled to hook the TV up to the stereo, which required me to run new speaker wire. I'm quite sensitive to visual images, I have a fairly good eye for photographic composition, and a well-developed typographic sense. I am however an aural clod and probably tone deaf. Even so, I can tell that the stereo sounds better than the TV.

I also bought an HDMI-HDMI cable for the DVD Recorder to replace the initial analog connection through a video switchbox. And I have a DVI-HDMI cable so that I can hook my MacBook up to this enormous external monitor. Only this last is disappointing. Everything else looks marvelous.

Be careful what you say: you might trigger a Google Alert.

Eric had the temerity last week to gripe on his blog about a certain open source business intelligence product, and got swarmed by irate defenders. Apparently he showed up in their Google Alerts. Some of the posters were helpful, but the ad hominem attackers were more entertaining:

Your blog has had 22 posts in the past year, and your blogroll includes absolutely no one of note in the open source world. So I think it’s safe to say that while you are pointing out a perception that they should address in some way, that your opinion isn’t worth much.

I'm in his blogroll, but I'll stipulate that I'm not of note, despite my reach. On the other hand, Ben Collins-Sussman and Karl Fogel are two of the primary Subversion developers and Subversion is the VCS for thousands of open source projects.

I mentioned Raymond C's enormous blog post queue in yesterday's post. I triggered a Google Alert: he emailed me this morning to say that the queue was up to 16 months! <boggle/>

In a footnote to the post about Proposition 8 on November 7th, I said that it was the first in a series of daily posts for NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month, which I had just found out about.

Here I am a month later, having posted something every single evening. I covered humor; movie and book reviews; being the #1 tech blog (now #2); politics; Thanksgiving; food; personal stuff; and even some technical posts. Whew!

Why bother? As with the two-year-old exercise in book reviews, it was a personal challenge to come up with a post every single evening for a month. Sometimes, the events of the day made for an obvious choice; a few days, I struggled to find a topic.

I have not been batching up posts, though I have a few ideas in the queue. When I was at Microsoft, I was startled to see Raymond Chen's blog post queue. He had at least two months worth of daily posts queued up on his personal, internal webserver—http://abject, I think it was called.

I've attempted NaNoWriMo three times, where the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. In 2001, Emma wrote about 23K words of Stargate SG-1 fanfic, while I churned out 41K words on a medieval fantasy. Neither of us has been willing to do anything more with those manuscripts. In 2002 and 2005, I abandoned my attempts in the first chapter.

NaBloPoMo was a sustainable exercise for me. I'm going to continue trying to post something every day. It's said that it takes 3-4 weeks of repetition to form a habit. We'll see if this one has taken hold.

Perusing Eric S. Raymond's blog recently, I noticed his claim that as a one-time maintainer of GIFLIB, just about every cellphone and browser has some of his software running in it.

That got me thinking about my own reach and where software that I've contributed to can be found.

‘Oh that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?’

—Robert Browning

I spent seven years on the IIS (Internet Information Services) development team at Microsoft. By any measure, that's a successful product, running one-third of all websites. There are over 100 million registered websites. Many of them are parked and many others see negligible volume, but that's millions, perhaps tens of millions of Windows Server boxes.

Two of those years were spent working on http.sys, the kernel-mode driver that underpins IIS 6. Http.sys was back-ported to Windows XP and released as part of XP SP2 (though IIS 6 never was), and it's an integral part of all later versions of Windows. That's hundreds of millions of Windows boxes.

And then there's Vim. I wrote much of the Win32-specific code–and all the Win64-specific code–but I also made contributions to the core code. Vim has long been the standard implementation of vi in most Linux distributions. And Vim is installed on all recent versions of Mac OS X.

So, I can claim Windows and Linux and Mac–though few cellphones. Not too shabby.

(I'm also one of a small number of people thanked in ESR's Jargon File; in my case, for TeX arcana and painstaking proofreading.)

My first Thanksgiving took place nineteen years ago. I was a 24-year-old graduate student, recently arrived at Brown. One of my officemates and her husband insisted that I and a Swedish grad student accompany them to her parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. It snowed that day, the first snow of the winter. We set off in what seemed like a blizzard, up I-95 into Massachusetts. The day was cold, but the reception was warm. A houseful of Patrice's relatives made us most welcome.

Ever since, I've always sat down to a large, convivial dinner at Thanksgiving. At first, others welcomed me into their homes. For the last decade, Emma and I have played host to others who, like us, have no relatives in the area.

In the early years, Thanksgiving had little emotional resonance for me. It had not been part of my childhood. Unlike Christmas, it had no deep-seated associations for me. I had no family traditions to draw upon. I had not grown up eagerly anticipating Thanksgiving every year.

Now, I do look forward to it. Thanksgiving is a fine day to beat back the winter gloom, to share in the warmth of our friends. Halloween and Christmas are rankly commercial, but the merchants have never managed to draw Thanksgiving down to the same depths.

I give thanks for my lovely wife, for my health and prosperity, and for my dear friends.

I've been very happy with my MacBook Pro. It's my primary home machine, sitting on the living room coffee table, and getting far more use than the desktop system in my office upstairs.

But it rarely leaves the house. It's big–a 17" screen–and it's heavy. I seldom carry it anywhere and I hardly ever bring it to a coffee shop.

I bought myself a netbook last month, an Asus Eee 1000H: 10" screen, 1024x600, 1.6GHz dual core Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, 3lbs, $479. Look at how much bigger the MacBook is in the photo! For reference, the Eee 1000H is the same size as a magazine. It's small enough and light enough that I take it with me every day, and it's been inside many a coffee shop.

The Eee came with Windows XP Home. I immediately repartitioned it and put Ubuntu Eee on the second partition. I don't think I've booted back into Windows after the first few days. All the devices (webcam, sound) and apps (Skype, Flash) work and I have all the Ubuntu goodness, optimized for this form factor, instead of a seven-year-old operating system.

The keyboard is adequate for my slender hands, though I would not care to do a lot of writing on it. The main problem that I continue to have with it is the placement of the right-hand Shift key, to the right of the Up-arrow key. My touch-typing fingers expect to find Shift beside the /, dammit.

The Elantech trackpad drove me nuts initially. Under both XP and Ubuntu Eee, it's configured with all kinds of multitouch gestures. Far too often, I inadvertently clicked or selected merely by hovering over the trackpad while typing. With some pain (especially on Ubuntu), I figured out how to turn all that crap off, so that it merely moves the mouse around and the right edge scrolls.

The screen is a little too small at 1024x600. The Netbook Remix interface replaces the GNOME desktop with a custom launcher. Each window runs maximized by default with minimal trimmings.

For a low-power machine, it's surprisingly fast. The Atom has two cores, so even if one is maxed out, the other one keeps the machine responsive. 1GB has been sufficient so far, but I'll probably get a 2GB stick because RAM is cheap.

I'm very pleased with the Eee. It nicely complements my MacBook.

A week ago, I said that my technical blog somehow comes up as #1 technical blog on Google.

Several people pointed out that in my screenshot, I was logged in to Google. As you can see if you click on this screenshot, I can reproduce this result even when I'm not signed in.

I'm still confounded by that ranking. My content is good, but largely unremarkable—though I'm unduly fond of A Use for Octal; my style is understated; my traffic is uncongested; and my top billing is undeserved.

But none of the technical blogs listed on that first page are of the first order, except Mark Russinovich's.

If I thought it made sense, I'd be flattered. Alas, I cannot make it so.

I've slowly been working my way through Shakespeare's Kings (recommended), so when I realized that Henry IV was playing at the Seattle Shakespeare Company, I decided to go. It's an adaptation of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2.

Henry IV usurped the crown from his cousin Richard II. The crown sits uneasily upon his head, rebellion is brewing, and his heir, Prince Hal (the future Henry V), is a wastrel who carouses with thieves like the fat rogue Falstaff. Hal, Falstaff, Henry IV, and Harry Hotspur (the rebel leader) are the central characters in this play. Hal's dissolution is compared unfavorably to Hotspur's chivalry. He must redeem himself in his father's eyes and cast off the influence of Falstaff, the "tutor and feeder of my riots".

This is an energetic production, with a good deal of sword fighting in the battle scenes in the second act. The larger than life Falstaff steals many of his scenes, while Hal must move nimbly between comedy and tragedy. Most of the cast adeptly juggle multiple roles.

Ends Sunday, November 16th. Recommended.

Emma and I moved in together in August 1998, and promptly started a tradition that we've maintained ever since: Games Night. On the second and fourth Thursday evening of every month, we invite our friends over to play board games.

For us, it's a low-effort way to stay in touch with our friends, and for our friends to see each other. Some people are regulars and make it almost every time. Others we see once or twice a year at Games Night, if that. Games are the excuse, but many people come by to chat.

We provide a space and a predictable time. We have drinks on hand and often a snack. Our guests will often bring a snack too; some bring their own games to augment our selection.

Tonight was typical. Kal and his daughter Robin came, and Louise dropped by for a while. We played Upwords, a sort of lightweight 3D Scrabble.

A friend whom I haven't heard from in a few years googled for technical blog this evening, and my technical blog somehow came up as the very first hit!

I have no idea how I achieved such high page rank, nor how I eclipsed Mark Russinovich.

As I mentioned last month, I participated in this year's AIDS Walk this morning.

I raised $1106 online, handily exceeding my goal of $750. I also raised another $115 in cash and checks at the fundraising barbecue that we threw on September 27th.

Thanks to the 20 people who sponsored me!

If you're reading this post directly on my blog, you have probably noticed that the top section in the sidebar is “George Reilly’s shared items”.

If you're reading this through an RSS reader, let me tell you that that section contains various items that I'm sharing through Google Reader. Mostly these are items that I've read from blogs that I'm subscribed to in Google Reader, but I'm also using the Note in Reader bookmarklet to share arbitrary webpages. If I choose, I can add a note to each item that I share.

Formerly, I would occasionally summon up the energy to post some Odds and Ends. Now I'm more likely to share those items in Reader.

If you're using Google Reader, you can subscribe to my shared items by adding george.v.reilly as a friend. Otherwise, you can occasionally check my blog or this shared items link.

There doesn't seem to be a way for me to make my shared items into an RSS feed, alas.

This year is the 22nd anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The Reagan administration was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1.5 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. LLAA cooks more than 130,000 fresh meals each year, provides case management for 1200 people, provides 1400 people with health insurance support, packs 30,000 grocery bags, and distributes condoms and safe-sex information to high-risk populations.

I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS. Please help me raise money again for this year's walk on Saturday, October 4th. I aim to raise at least $750.

You can sponsor me by going to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk.

Note: Emma and I are having a fundraising barbecue on Saturday, September 27th. Email me for more details.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you'll be helping thank you.

I formed a Bike to Work team at Cozi. More at the Cozi Connections Blog

Last week was the second anniversary of my brother Mark's wedding to Lizzy.

Next week will be the first anniversary of my sister Michelle's wedding to David.

The day after that, my parents will be flying to Egypt to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of their first date.

And Emma and I just got back from a three-day weekend in Astoria, Oregon, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our own first date.

Sheesh!

My little brother, Mark Reilly aka the Alien Resident, successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on Tuesday and may now be addressed as "Dr. Reilly."

He studied part-time at the European Graduate School in New York City, while juggling several jobs. His doctorate is in Media and Communications and the topic was Propaganda of the Dead: Terrorism and Revolution, which he picked before 9/11.

He is only the second PhD in the family. My uncle Pat Deasy was the first.

Congratulations, Mark!

Cozi is hiring. We have positions for Developers and Web Developers.

We're a small Web 2.0 startup, based in the Smith Tower in downtown Seattle. Our Cozi Central product is groupware for families: it helps parents manage their own and their kids' schedules, shopping lists, and reminders, from computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.

If you're interested, let me know.

Update: we have some non-developer positions too.

This year is the 21st anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The Reagan administration was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. LLAA cooks more than 100,000 fresh meals each year, provides case management for 946 people, assists 800 people with housing resources, packs 30,000 grocery bags, and distributes condoms and safe-sex information to high-risk populations.

I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS. Please help me raise money again for this year's walk on Saturday, September 29th. I aim to raise at least $1000.

You can sponsor me by going to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you'll be helping thank you.

Note: Emma and I are having a fundraising barbecue on Sunday 23rd September. Email me for more details.

I worked at Atlas Solutions, a subsidiary of aQuantive, from October 2005 to July 2007.

Google bought our largest competitor, DoubleClick, for $3 Billion in April 2006. In the following five weeks, all the other major web advertising companies were bought up, culminating in Microsoft paying the stupendous sum of $6 billion for aQuantive. The Microsoft-aQuantive deal closes in mid-August.

To put it mildly, I was not excited at the thought of becoming a Microsoft employee yet again. Cumulatively, between 1992 and 2005, I spent 10 years at Microsoft as an employee or contractor, including a year and a half on Cairo, seven years on IIS, and a year on FlexGo.

Nevertheless, I had absolutely no desire to go back to being a Microserf. I don't like Microsoft's business practices, I'm sick of the evil empire vibe, I'm tired of the hostility to Open Source, I don't want to work for asshats like Steve Ballmer, and I have old scars from my earlier tours of duty that trigger my fight-or-flight response. I've done my time in the Redmond saltmines and I just want to be a productive member of society now. Microsoft is like a gravitational black hole: it warps everything in its vicinity. Life is too short to work at a company whose values are fundamentally different to my own.

Your mileage may vary. I know many decent people at Microsoft who are doing good work. I applaud them, but I do not wish to rejoin them.

That's not to say that I think everyone should flee Atlas. Having Microsoft on your resume is a definite plus, and it's the right choice for many people. I think everyone should make their own cost-benefit analysis and decide if they want to work for Microsoft or not. I've written code that literally runs on hundreds of millions of machines: http.sys, available on all Windows XP SP2 machines, Windows Server 2003, and Vista. There are few other companies where you can have that kind of reach.

However, Microsoft and Atlas have very different corporate cultures. Microsoft is a hard-assed, hard-driving culture. Atlas has a far more reasonable pro-work-life-balance culture. I've seen several alpha-male types being rejected by the team-fit interviews at Atlas who would have fit in just fine at Microsoft.

Microsoft claim that they will make few changes to aQuantive and Atlas. Certainly, they would be incredibly foolish to kill the golden goose after spending such an enormous amount. I really hope they have the sense to leave well enough alone.

Anyway, I'm not going to find out first hand. I spent a few weeks looking around in June, and I found a new position at Cozi.com. My last day at Atlas was Friday, July 27th. I'll miss my old team in Emerging Media. They were the best team that I ever worked on, and I'm proud of the Video-on-Demand and In-Stream web video products that we built.

My criteria for a new job were that it should be a small company, somewhere in downtown Seattle or Fremont, within an easy bus ride of my home in Beacon Hill, doing something reasonably interesting. From 1992 to 2005, all my jobs were on the Eastside, while I lived in Seattle proper. I never, ever want to commute across Lake Washington again. Atlas has 300 or 400 employees, aQuantive has 2600, and Microsoft has 78,000. I wanted a small company, where it's really possible to make a difference.

On Monday, August 6th, I'll be starting work at Cozi.com, building groupware products for families: shared calendars, lists, messages, photos, Outlook integration, and so on. Cozi is in the Smith Tower, three blocks from Atlas's Pioneer Square location. Cozi is a two-year-old startup with 18 people when I signed on, and they flattered me by aggressively pursuing me. I have high hopes that it's going to work out.

Cozi recently raised $4 million in a second round of angel financing. We consider our biggest competitor to be pencil and paper and we like to consider ourselves as a digital refrigerator magnet. The Wall Street Journal's Mossberg Solution and Lifehacker have favorable reviews of the released product. PodVentureZone has a multipart interview (mostly transcribed) with Robbie Cape, Cozi's CEO and co-founder.

Cozi's vacation policy is 2+2. Everyone gets two weeks off when they choose, and the company closes for a week at Christmas and a week in August (this week). I've spent the last week doing a lot of cycling around the Seattle area. We're going to Ireland and Italy at the end of August, and Emma couldn't take any more time off.

Back to work next week. Wish me luck.

I made my radio debut this afternoon. The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read a couple of short excerpts on KBCS from James Joyce's Ulysses, as a foretaste of the readings we're doing next weekend.

This year's reading is of the Nausicaa chapter, wherein Leopold Bloom reposes on a beach to recover from clashing with the Citizen in the previous chapter, and flirts at a distance with young Gerty MacDowell. This is the infamous masturbation chapter that led to Ulysses being banned for obscenity.

There are two readings.

• Sat, June 16th, 4:30pm
  Elliott Bay Bookstore
  101 S. Main St,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

• Sun, June 17th, 6pm
  Pike Pub and Brewery
  1415 First Ave,
  Seattle, WA 98101.

I will be one of several readers giving voice to Leopold Bloom. It is likely that Jim McDermott will once again be reading with us.

I got myself a R.E.Load bag for my birthday. My previous bag, a so-called Large Cafe bag from Tom Bihn, wasn't large enough to accommodate a 17" MacBook Pro.

The R.E.Load bag turned out to be less than ideal. It is, if anything, too big, and it lacks dividers and smaller pockets. My laptop and other stuff was swimming around inside it. It's a messenger bag aimed at real bike messengers, not laptop-toting nerds.

Last weekend, I went down to Tom Bihn's showroom again and picked up a Super Ego bag, like the one pictured here. This bag is designed to tote laptops, and it's working out a lot better.

I still have the other bag for now. R.E.Load would only take it back for in-store credit, and I didn't see myself wanting another bag from them. I haven't decided if I'm going to hang on to it, or try to sell it on Craig's List.

It's a pity. I like the outside of the R.E.Load bag and the inside of the Tom Bihn bag.

Ignite Seattle is a series of geek nights in Seattle, hosted by O'Reilly Radar and Make magazine. The third one is coming up on Thursday, April 5th, at CHAC, the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

Could be interesting. I think I might go.

Paging through the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, I spotted the obituary for Tsai-Fan Yu, the physician who developed effective treatments for gout, including allopurinol and colchicine.

I take allopurinol every day, topping up with colchicine when I feel gouty, so I owe her a great debt of gratitude.

I blogged before about my gout. (Indeed, this is why I put up the mega repost yesterday of my old EraBlog posts, to make my gout post available before writing this one.)

Nothing has changed, for better or for worse, regarding my gout. I take allopurinol every day and expect to do so for the rest of my life, unless a cure for gout is found. Fortunately for me, it's quite manageable. In the old days, gout could be both crippling and agonizing. I have had some severe attacks, early in this decade, before my case was definitively diagnosed. One of my knees would swell up and become intensely painful. Even bending it slightly so that I could get into a car and be driven to a doctor to get painkillers would cause me to break out into a cold sweat. I'm damn glad I don't have to live with that kind of pain on a daily basis.

I came across Gout News while researching this post, an ongoing compendium of gout-related news stories..

In Blast from the Past I, I presented about half of the posts that I made on my original blog at EraBlog.

I'm reposting the remaining posts now.

2003/03/18: Red, White, and Green

2003/03/21: Rallying at the Seattle Federal Building

2003/03/21: The Unseen Gulf War

2003/03/24: When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History

2003/03/30: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

2003/04/22: Her Left Foot

2003/04/24: Sleep Apnea

2003/05/16: Naturalization

2003/06/11: Bloomsday

2003/06/12: Howard Dean for President

2003/07/07: Bloomsday Speech

2003/07/10: Ping-Pong Reloaded

2003/07/23: Iraqi Dead Parrot

2003/07/25: U.S. Citizen

2003/07/27: What Makes a Conservative?

2003/08/14: Spinning our Hearts and Minds

2003/10/07: Spolin Games

2003/10/11: Gout

2003/10/18: Bob Beckel

2003/12/02: Free Ruslan Sharipov

2004/02/11: Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

2004/02/11: Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment

2004/06/25: Moved to weblogs.asp.net

2005/12/05: Moved to GeorgeVReilly.com/blog

There are a few old posts at weblogs.asp.net that I should repost here for completeness.

The Ides of March rolls around again, and it's my birthday. I am now the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Emma gave me the messenger bag shown here. I picked it up from R.E.Load Baggage. The 17" MacBook Pro is too large for my previous shoulder bag.

The video clip below shows the Bugatti Veyron, the world's fastest and most expensive street-legal car attempting to hit its top speed of 253 mph. I guess I'm not getting one of these for my birthday.

I noted at the beginning of July that my sister Michelle was to be married to David Bowles in Dublin in early November.

The wedding took place on Friday, November 10th. Emma and I arrived the afternoon before, half stumbling with tiredness. My brother, Mark, and his wife, Lizzy, had arrived from New York only hours earlier.

The ceremony took place at 1pm at St. Brigid's, a small, old Anglican church, on the outskirts of Stillorgan village, long since absorbed into the Dublin metropolitan area. It was very Ascendancy, with 19th century plaques about Fellow of the Royal College this and Brevet Colonel (Boer War) that.

The bride looked lovely, and I have the photos to prove it.

After the wedding, we all repaired to Barberstown Castle for the reception. There were, I think, 160 guests who partied late into the night. Emma and I gave up around 1:30, exhausted from the jet lag. My mother didn't get to bed until after 4am. Philip Bowles, David's father, who had been undergoing chemotherapy, was in fine form and stayed up nearly as late.

Emma and I had arranged to stay a second night at Barberstown Castle, and I ended up sleeping until 4pm on the Saturday, trying to sleep off the drink and the jetlag.

The following week, my mother and I went through the nearly 400 photos that she, Emma, David Reilly, and I had taken, and whittled it down to 74 representative ones. She badly wanted to send the photos to her friends around the world, so I set up a Picasa web album for her and uploaded them.

Mark set up a site for Michelle and David before the wedding, but it doesn't yet link to the photos.

Email is addictive because of "operant conditioning":

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. ... The most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. Animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed. There's a logic to this. Although we might know that we've stopped rewarding the animal, it has got used to performing the behaviour and not getting the reward. Because 'next time' might always be the occasion that produces the reward, there's never definite evidence that rewards have stopped altogether.

... Checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. Sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. Sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. And because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless.

So what to do about it?

If a behaviour isn't rewarded then it will gradually disappear. The problem is that we don't want to remove the reward (email), so we need, instead, to weaken the strength of the link between the action and the reward. A simple delay would do this - imagine a five minute delay between hitting the check email button and getting new email. A delay is doubly-effective because the longer the delay the more likely you are to have email and so the more consistent the reward will be.

I didn't find any suggestions that were particularly effective, however.

I'm not addicted to email, per se. I can however surf the web endlessly. There's always one more fascinating link to follow.

In my wanderings, I recently came across two sites where you can ask all kinds of strange questions, with a reasonable expectation of getting an answer.

Little Details: "writers have questions, other writers have answers". A LiveJournal community for writers seeking all kinds of background information for their plots. Some samples:

• 1920's cold remedies

• Danish drinking songs

• Control parents have over their children testifying.

Ask MetaFilter is more general purpose. It's a good place to go when your question can't be reduced to a keyword search on Google. Sample questions:

• What's the fastest and cheapest way to paint a red room white?

• Is there a program for the Mac that will scroll a window to capture a screenshot of its entire contents?

• I want to be my own YouTube/Google video. Is there an easy way to show videos on my own server embedded in a page?

• What's the best vegan substitute for lard?

I experimented with Google's new service, Google Transit.

It suggested this route for traveling from my home to my work:

 Begin by walking
 1   Start at 4XXX 13th Ave S
 2   Go to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way (takes about 7 mins)

 Take the King County Metro 131 (Direction: NORTH)
 3   7:17pm leave from Airport Way S & S Industrial Way
 4   7:24pm arrive at 4th Ave S & S Jackson St

 End by walking
 5   Go to 315 5th Ave S (takes about 2 mins)

This fails badly in two respects.

First, four bus routes run along 15th Avenue S, two blocks east of my house: the 39, the 32, the 36, and the 60. The 39 drops me one block from work at 4th & Jackson. The 60 leaves me at 12th & Jackson. The 36 only runs along 15th after 7pm; earlier than that, I a 10-minute walk to Beacon Ave. And the 32 is an express bus that only runs at rush hour.

Second, it suggests that it's a seven-minute walk to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way. Actually, it's a two-mile walk, because I-5 and the railroad are in the way. You have the unpleasant choices of walking north to Spokane Street and climbing down an endless set of stairs at the freeway onramp, or south to the Lucile St bridge. And even if there were a direct route, it would take at least 10 minutes to walk down there.

That said, it integrates very nicely with Google Maps.

The Google Transit page links to Metro Trip Planner, which does a better job. Their disambiguation of addresses sucks, however. Try entering 5th & Jackson. It suggests a short list, starting with 5TH AVE S & S JACKSON ST (in SEATTLE). However, if you actually type that address into the main page, it offers you a long list of suggestions. In other words, it can't consume its own output.

Update 2006/12/29. I just tried the same experiment again. Google Transit now correctly suggests walking two blocks east to 15th Ave S and taking the 39.

As I mentioned last month, I participated in this year's AIDS Walk on Saturday.

I raised over $1300 online, handily exceeding my goal of $1,000. I also raised another $300 in cash and checks at the fundraising barbecue that we threw on September 1st.

I've lost count, but I believe that in the last 15 years, I've raised about $10,000 for charity. Most of it has been for the Northwest AIDS Walk. The last few years that I was at Microsoft, I raised $2,000-$3,000 each year, thanks to the power of Microsoft matching, which doubled the amount of money that I raised. I've also raised money two years running for Ugandan orphans sponsored by Vim: Microsoft Vim Users raised $2650 for orphans in Uganda.

Go me!

MoneyCentral is reporting that our Video On Demand product is running a major pilot:

Cable television operator Sunflower Broadband and MTV Networks today announced that they are launching a market-leading campaign to dynamically insert national advertisements into on-demand cable television. Sunflower will begin dynamically placing ads into MTV Networks on-demand programming this week. The first campaign, created and managed by the agency Mediaedge:cia, promotes the theatrical release of Paramount Pictures' and MTV Films' major motion picture "jackass number two", in theaters nationwide on September 22. Ads for the movie will be inserted into Comedy Central On Demand programs at the moment that viewers request the free on-demand shows.

more ...

In mid-July, most of the Atlas Solutions developer teams moved from our old offices at Fifth and Jackson in the International District four blocks west to swanky offices in Pioneer Square. The new offices are at the State building on the corner of Occidental and Main, the pedestrianized block with the antique stores and art galleries. Occidental Park across the street has been refurbished. There are three coffee shops within two blocks, and Elliott Bay Books is one block west of us. It's all very pleasant, with the exception of the large number of homeless people.

The only thing that I miss from the old offices is that we're further from the large number of Asian restaurants in the International District.

I move back to 5&J the week after next. Two developers from my team, Atlas OnDemand, are being loaned to another team for a few months.

The picture of me on a milk carton arises from the email exchange after the loan was announced. Our boss said that he would post pictures of the two of us so that the OnDemand team wouldn't forget what we look like. I demanded to see my picture on a milk carton and, lo, that was arranged forthwith.

This year is the 20th anniversary of the Northwest AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed. Twenty years ago, AIDS was considered a gay man's disease and a death sentence. The U.S. government was just beginning to acknowledge the existence of AIDS, half a decade after it had first been recognized by health authorities, and thousands had died.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the development of antiretroviral drugs a decade ago means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year in the U.S., and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-fifth of the adults in southern Africa have HIV! Nearly 40 milllion people are living with HIV around the world, and another 25 million are dead.

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance provides a variety of services to those living with HIV/AIDS in Washington State. I've walked in the AIDS Walk every year since 1992 and I've raised thousands of dollars for AIDS services and awareness.

Please help me meet my fundraising goal of $1000 this year by sponsoring me at my AIDS Walk page. I will be walking on September 9th.

I thank you, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people you help thank you.

Update: Go to http://www.georgevreilly.com/aidswalk to sponsor me.

My brother David sent me this photo earlier today, of me, him, and Michelle. I'm guessing that Michelle is less than a year old, so it was taken sometime in 1971, which would make David four and me six. (Our youngest brother, Mark, wasn't born until 1973.)

Emma thinks we're adorable and has already made this picture her desktop background on her work computer.

Mark has another photo of the four of us, taken in 1978 on his website, alienresident.net:

Raven is now Doctor Raven. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in biomedical informations this morning. Six long years in the making.

Dr. Raven and Mr. Raven came over this evening for Games Night, a twice-monthly get-together we have for our friends to play board games. Emma and I had been given a bottle of Dom Perignon '92 for our wedding that we had never quite found a suitable occasion for until now, so we chilled that in anticipation of tonight's celebration. I generally don't care for champagne, but that went down nicely.

Congratulations, Raven!

I hadn't really planned to visit Ireland this year, but then my sister Michelle phoned the other day to say that her boyfriend, David Bowles, had just proposed to her. Not a big surprise. They had moved in together earlier this year, and we were all assuming that it was a question of when, not if.

They plan to get married quite soon, as his father has been given six-to-nine months to live, and they want him to be at the wedding. I don't know if the date is firm yet, but the latest that I'm hearing is November 11th.

I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times about some useful lessons learned from animal trainers.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

... 

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.

I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.

... 

On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.

Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.

At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.

I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.

... 

I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.

Hmmm...

In May, I pounded out a record 31 blog posts. June draws to a close and this is only my third post.

In brief, here's some of the highlights of June.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle read the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses on June 16th. I read a part and I was also the script wrangler and webmaster.

My profile on my Windows XP laptop got corrupted. I decided that I would make flatten it and turn it into a dual-boot system. I'm now on my third week of running Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). Quite easy to get going. Not so easy to get everything that I wanted running on it.

In late May at WinHEC, Microsoft announced FlexGo, the new pay-as-you-go and subscription versions of Windows. I spent a year working on this project, specifically on the hardware locking that underlies the business model. I swear I will write a more interesting post on this soon.

This weekend was Gay Pride, which was held for the first time at the Seattle Center. I helped staff the Freely Speaking Toastmasters booth yesterday morning.

As one of my commitments when I stepped down as president of BiNet Seattle I made up a new banner, which we marched behind in the Raise Your Voice march yesterday evening.

My woodworking class has finished, so my Tuesday nights are free for the summer. I'm making a coffee table. It's about half finished. I've taken a few photos along the way; I'll have to post some of them.

My opera education continues. Tonight, we saw Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's MacBeth.

I used to be very familiar with Shakespeare's MacBeth, having studied it for two years in preparation for the Leaving Certificate (the major examination at the end of Irish secondary school; effectively the entrance exam for university).

Verdi's opera of MacBeth truncates Shakespeare's plot, concentrating on the tragic flaw of the MacBeths. Their shared ambition, feeding off each other, both impels them to power, and leads to their ultimate downfall. The opera was written during the Risorgimento, when Italy was trying to break away from the Austrian empire, and doubles as a thinly veiled appeal to Italian patriotism.

I had more fun at Cosi Fan Tutte, when we saw it in March. The music and singing was fine in MacBeth, but I did not care for the monochromatic costumes and sets, which reminded me of Mourning Becomes Electra. The cast looked as if they had stepped out of a daguerrotype of a funeral. There's no fun in Verdi's MacBeth. Shakespeare's tragedies are always leavened by some comic doings, but not Verdi's.

I first started blogging at EraBlog in February 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq war. EraBlog never really took off and now seems to be experiencing technical problems.

I'm reposting all of my original posts. I've cleaned up the links, where possible, and added an image at the top of each one, but have not otherwise modified the posts.

As you can see, Iraq weighed on my mind. And I was fucking right! Going to war was wrong, and even then I (like many others) could see that the case for war was lacking.

2003/02/07: Casus Belli

2003/02/07: Pencil Carvings

2003/02/07: State of the Union

2003/02/07: Hasbians: Bi for Now

2003/02/07: Barbara Lee: Public Enemy Number One?

2003/02/08: Bush-Iraq parody of Nigerian spam scam

2003/02/09: Casus Belli II

2003/02/09: TiVo

2003/02/09: Powell at the UN

2003/02/14: Patriot Act II

2003/02/14: Hans Blix reports to the UN

2003/02/14: Seattle Peace Rally, Sat 15th Feb, Seattle Center

2003/02/20: The Seattle March

2003/02/21: MSNBC's The Savage Nation

2003/02/24: Why Nerds are Unpopular in American high schools

2003/02/26: Why God is a Computer Programmer

2003/03/04: Irish Personals

2003/03/12: The Onion does St. Patty's Day

2003/03/17: Candlelight Vigil for Peace

2003/03/18: How Bush made enemies of our allies

More to follow tomorrow.

Today (May 6th) was our sixth wedding anniversary. In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. In others, it feels like we've been together forever.

Six pretty good years. Lots of good memories. Quiet times. Happy times. Travel together. Staying home together. Going out together. Mixing with our friends.

Not perfect years. I'd change a few things if I could, like Emma's health and her two long periods of unemployment. I should have quit Microsoft months before I did in 2004.

We celebrated by having some friends over for dinner. Raven came with Mr. Raven. Muhsin and Banu, newly back from a long trip to Turkey, came too. I made Afghan Chicken. It was a little dry this time, but it was still a big hit. Emma hurt her foot last week, so I did all the cooking.

Tomorrow morning, we're going on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train for brunch.

The latest issue of BusinessWeek covers Atlas On Demand, the product that I've worked on for the last six months, in a piece called TV Eyeballs Close-Up

Ever since the advent of commercial television, advertisers have wondered exactly what they get for the megabucks they spend on 30-second spots. After all, the networks and cable companies offer only a crude approximation of who is watching what. With such thin information, advertisers can't target specific neighborhoods or consumer tastes. As for converting ads directly to sales, well, that's virtually impossible. Yet the Web, with its sophisticated per-click metrics, does all of that billions of times a day. "The problem," says Yankee Group analyst Aditya Kishore, "is that there's not enough math in [the TV] business."

But aQuantive Inc. (AQNT ) aims to change that. ... Despite the hoopla about advertisers moving online, the $70 billion television ad market dwarfs the Web business 5 to 1. Says aQuantive CEO Brian P. McAndrews, once an ABC executive: "TV is the largest medium out there."

... 

That's why aQuantive is taking baby steps. Starting in June, the company's Atlas on Demand unit will begin testing technology that measures video-on-demand (VOD) viewers for Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR ) VOD's Web-like interactivity is what sold aQuantive. Besides, the medium is taking off, with digital cable now in 25 million homes, far ahead of TiVo's 4.4 million.

By gathering data from the same set-top boxes viewers use to order shows and movies, Atlas on Demand plans to figure out how many people watched a show and when, as well as how many watched the ads vs. skipped them. From there, company executives hope to help advertisers determine precisely how much attention their money buys. "You know people watch Lost," says John Chandler, Atlas on Demand senior analyst. "[Now] you'll know if they watch the ad."

... 

Proponents of VOD hope the medium will become as interactive as the Web itself, allowing viewers to get discount offers, enter contests, and even buy stuff. Burger King is considering running ads offering drive-through deals to late-night VOD viewers. Such ads could be priced based on the number of leads or sales they generate rather than the number of viewers they attract. "The intersection of video on demand and interactive TV is the next frontier," says Time Warner Cable (TWX ) Executive Vice-President Peter C. Stern. "I look for it to emerge in 2007."

... 

Despite myriad challenges, the cable guys have little choice but to become more Web-like. Every other day, it seems, marks the launch of yet another ad-supported online channel. Karl Siebrecht, Atlas' general manager, bets Web video will become a major ad market sooner than VOD, but he says on-demand TV eventually will be bigger. He and the other Atlas folks don't care whether the next great video market is TV or the Web. They plan to make money either way.

Read the full article here.

By the way, the Atlas On Demand team is hiring. We have current and future openings for a dev manager and for senior developers. There are other openings at Atlas in Seattle too: look at the Atlas Careers page.

If you want to send résumés through me, email me at George.Reilly @ AtlasSolutions.com

Emma now has a personal blog.

I often complain about being busy, no doubt because I have a talent for complicating my life. Things were relatively quiet for a while, but that's not true anymore.

At work, we're close to releasing the first version of our product. Happily, crunch time at Atlas isn't nearly as bad as it was at Microsoft. Instead of working eight-ish hours a day, it's more like nine or maybe ten. The pressure level has risen, of course, but it's far from intolerable.

The real busyness is in my extracurricular life. I'm the president of BiNet Seattle, a bisexual community group, and have been for the last three years. I also do a hell of a lot of the work and I'm burning out. I recently gave notice that I'm stepping down. (It looks like a successor has been found.) Meanwhile, a lot of planning is going on in an effort to revitalize BiNet, as attendance has been dragging.

For the last few years, I've also been heavily involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, as the webmaster and the co-dramaturge. We do readings of Irish literature, particularly that of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Every June 16th (Bloomsday), we do a staged reading of a chapter of Ulysses. This year, the longtime director has moved back to Northern Ireland. Currently, I am acting as the director, on top of my other roles, but I don't think I'm the right person for the job, and I'm hoping to find a replacement soon.

I'm a member of Freely Speaking Toastmasters, an LGBT speaking club. I've been working on my CTM for far too long, and I intend to knock off the final three speeches this year.

I resume my woodworking class next week, which is going to tie up ten Tuesday evenings. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to work on this time. In previous years, I built a very nice set of nesting tables and an unsatisfactory pair of bar stools.

In my Copious Spare Time, I'm also making occasional contributions to two open source projects, DasBlog and Vim. I made Vim compile with VC5-VC8, and I promised Bram that I would provide some documentation on debugging Vim with WinDbg and dealing with minidumps. I'd also like to produce a native Win64 version. With DasBlog, I've provided some feedback on the usability of the installation instructions, as well as a fix for dodgy permalinks. I'd also like to make use of my former expertise on IIS performance (see 25+ Tips, 10 Commandments, IIS 5 Tuning, and Professional ASP 3.0) to do some performance tuning of DasBlog.

I'd also like to fit in some time for photography; for reading my way through our enormous backlog of books and magazines; writing the occasional blog post; cooking; bicycle riding; traveling; working out; hanging out with my wife; socializing with my friends; movies; and more. Not to mention all the very dull projects around the house and garden that I've neglected.

I was born 41 years ago today. (Technically, yesterday, as it's now the early hours of March 16th.) I was to have been called Vincent after my father, but my mother's father, George Victor Clery, had died just 12 days before. I was baptised George Vincent Reilly on March 17th, St. Patrick's Day.

Beware the Ides of March, I tell people: You might have to buy George a present. Better a birthday present than the reception that Julius Caesar received on March 15th, 44BC.

I've never liked the name George all that much, but I've never disliked it enough to do anything about it. (Emma legally changed her entire name about ten years ago.) "George" has the advantage that it's largely gone out of fashion, but everyone recognizes it. How many Jeffs and Mikes and Scotts do you know? And how many Georges?

I realized over dinner with Emma that 15 years ago today, I took a momentous step: I came out as bisexual. It scared the hell out of me at the time. It hasn't always been easy. But it was definitely the right thing to do.

WashTech has a piece on frustrations with Microsoft's compensation system. Sounds about right to me. I don't miss the horseshit of Microsoft's stack ranking one little bit.

I just saw Mozart's Così Fan Tutte at the Seattle Opera. I had a great time. Lots of fun. Well acted. Great music. And a modern dress production that works.

The plot, in case you're unfamiliar, involves fiancée swapping. Two officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, accept a bet from Don Alfonso that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, are fickle and will easily betray them. They pretend to go off to war, then disguise themselves and each woos the other's fiancée under false pretences. Don Alfonso, along with Despina, the sisters' personal assistant (maid) sows mischief. Dorabella, the flirt, wears down quickly. Fiordiligi is tougher, but eventually yields. Ostensibly a comedy, by the end, everyone has been hurt. The three men are shits and deserve what they get; the sisters do not.

In most of the operas that I've seen, the acting has been pretty wooden. Most of them seemed to be glued to the spot. The acting was a lot better than usual. Perhaps because it was directed by the legendary Jonathan Miller.

There's an interesting interview in the program with Jonathan Miller.

JM: ... It’s not even about fidelity, which is what most people think it’s about, it’s about identity. It’s about people. You see, feminists often object to the opera because it depicts the women as gullible and foolish; but the fact is that the men are much more deceived than the women are. The most dangerous thing is to get into disguise in the belief that your original identity is invisible. What happens, of course, is that you actually bring to life aspects of your identity which you didn’t suspect. And I think that’s what happens here. It’s very dangerous for a man—or anyone—to disguise themselves because, in addition to deceiving the person who in fact you intend to deceive, you actually find that you’re behaving in ways which you wouldn’t normally behave if you thought your identity was apparent.

EH: So you’re letting a little too much of the beast out, as it were.

JM: Well not so much “the beast;” but all sorts of alternative versions of yourself which you didn’t suspect come into existence. I was partly inspired by a novel which my mother, a very successful English novelist [Betty Spiro Miller], wrote after the war about the experience of being an officer’s wife. My father was a medical officer. She noticed that as soon as all of his colleagues got into uniform, they suddenly started to misbehave in a way which they wouldn’t have done if they were in their professional civilian clothes. They somehow felt that they were not recognizable and therefore not culpable.

That’s one of the reasons why people get into disguise at masked balls. It allows them to be someone else. It lets out an alternative version of yourself—not necessarily a beast, but something that you didn’t expect.

Awww! Ain't he cute!

Via Emma, from CuteOverload.com, a cornucopia of terminally cute animal photos.

A couple of months ago, the Science Times section of the New York Times had an article on the Cute Factor.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

And if you do overload on cuteness, head over to Dependable Renegade for some really snarky, political photoblogging.

A very interesting piece in last Sunday's New York Times magazine: A Talib at Yale. Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is the former "roving ambassador" for the Taliban, now studying at Yale. An interesting and improbable life story.

The right-wing blogosphere is furious about it. I say it's better to co-opt moderate former Talibs than to freeze them out.

Besides, his B grades at Yale are better than George Bush's "Gentleman's C".

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have no use for organized sports. Watching baseball or basketball bores me. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of being a sports fan. I'm too much of a watchful outsider to want to throw myself into rooting for a team.

I actively despise American football. It reminds me far too much of the rugby of my youth. I spent 11 years at an Irish rugger-bugger school, so I come by it honestly. The ugly jock culture that permeates football repels me. The veneration of football in small-town America annoys me. The fans are obnoxious; the players, thugs.

I exaggerate, of course. There are plenty of agreeable people who (incomprehensibly) like football, and other sports cultures are often obnoxious. But I was not pleased when Seattle went to the Super Bowl, and not disappointed when they lost.

My dislike of organized team sports doesn't automatically extend to individual sports. Not that I spend any time watching other sports.

Normally.

I've spent a lot of time in the last week watching the Winter Olympics. The drama of Frode Estil, the Norwegian cross-country skier, who stumbled in the first second, leaving himself at the back of the field of 77, and pulled all the way back to win the silver. Shaun White flubbing an earlier round in the snowboarding half-pipe, and then going on to win the gold. Apolo Ohno touching a competitor's skate and spinning out of control. Lindsay Jacobellis showing off in the final stretch of her snowboard cross, squandering the gold. Lindsey Kildow taking a really bad fall during training, then coming back a couple of days later to compete. Defrasne pulling past Bjoerndalen in the last few seconds after 12.5km of skiing and shooting in the biathlon.

And of course the high drama of the pairs figure skating, where each of the three medals couples had a compelling personal story. The Russian couple, where the woman concussed herself after a bad fall a couple of years ago and the man took months to regain his confidence. The Chinese couple where the man had barely recovered from ripping his Achilles tendon last year. And the other Chinese couple, where the woman took a hard fall seconds into their routine and had to be helped off the ice. Five minutes later, they came back out and skated their hearts out, winning the silver.

I'm amazed at how many of the sports have results that are incredibly tightly clumped, even when they're not competing at exactly the same time. The long-track skating: they skate in pairs, but all the top times are within a second or so of each other after thousands of metres. The point spread in the freestyle moguls. Likewise for the figure skating.

It's especially true in the downhill skating. Darren Rahlves came in ninth in today's event, a mere 0.72 seconds behind the winner. Think of it. Nine skiers hurtling down a hill one at a time at high speed for 90 seconds, and their times are less than three-quarter of a second apart. There's no margin for error. None. The slightest misstep and you're an also-ran.

Makes for great watching.

A friend sent me a Word document with a parody of the Department of Homeland Security's Ready.Gov website. I googled and found an HTML copy of the parody here.

If you are sprayed with an unknown substance, stand and think about a cool design for a new tattoo.

Seriously, there is some useful information on Ready.Gov. Which reminds me that Emma and I are long overdue in putting together some disaster planning.

Here are some links that I put together a while back:

• AlphaGeek's 5-part series on disaster preparedness at DailyKos

• 3 days, 3 ways

• City of Seattle Emergency Resources

• Scott Hanselman's 2006 resolution

• ICE (In Case of Emergency) entries in your cellphone address book

If there's any lesson that should be learned from Katrina, it's that you need to have your own disaster plan in place.

Back in October, I joined Atlas Solutions as a senior software engineer. The company just held its first "partner summit", to educate some of our key partners on the kind of work we're doing and new developments. An attendee blogged it. I'm working on video on demand, the stuff that Scott Ferris talked about.

I saw some of the presentations being rehearsed last week, but a lot of this is stuff that I've never seen before. I come from a software background, after all, not an advertising background.

A useful compendium of health risks associated with excessive computer usage: Is Your Computer Killing You? RSI, eye strain, deep-vein thrombosis, insomnia, etc.

A little app that I find useful in reminding me to take occasional breaks is Workrave. Though I've gotten all too good at ignoring it.

Time for a break.

On Tuesday night, I felt like Imelda Marcos. I conducted a long-overdue purge of my closet, leaving me with two large boxes of clothes, mostly shirts and t-shirts. I probably got rid of 80% of my collection of Microsoft shirts. All in all, I had 63 empty hangars in the closet when I was done. Yikes!

Lately, I've been dressing a little better. More button-down shirts, fewer t-shirts. Not that there's been any pressure to do so at work -- the geeks at Atlas are just as badly informally dressed as at any other software company that I've worked at.

Via DailyKos: some of the nation's leading libraries have books bound in human skin.

At our Sixth Day of Christmas party yesterday, Delf started talking about burns from hot peppers, which reminded me of a crazy thread that I read a while back, Listening to habeneros, and of a sure-fire cure for hiccups from Diane Duane.

Me, when I get hiccups, I just take a very deep breath and hold it for as long as I can. If it doesn't work the first time, it does on the second attempt.

Cure #1, letting a large spoonful of sugar dissolve in the mouth, is the only cure that's ever worked for Emma.

Here's Diane Duane on curing hiccups:

Hiccups are the result of a blood serum electrolyte balance. The causes are various: talking too much while eating (my favorite), eating or drinking too fast, etc etc, whatever. Different causes tend to induce different kinds of imbalance. The imbalances are these:

1. Respiratory acidosis -- too much CO2 in the blood.
2. Respiratory alkalosis -- too little CO2 in the blood.

When you get one or the other of these, the body's tendency is to try to rectify the situation by pushing the lungs' contents in and out a lot faster, so that if there isn't enough CO2, some more can get into the bloodstream, and if there's too much, some can get out. Now, the body doesn't want to bother your conscious mind about this, so it does it in a simple, inelegant, and not wildly effective way: it makes your diaphragm spasm, compressing the lungs and shoving most of their tidal volume out with each spasm. This is the hiccup.

Now, you'd think that concentrating on breathing deeply and regularly, and ventilating yourself in a thoughtful manner, would put this problem right. Well, probably it will: but it takes forever, and you're sitting there hiccuping and feeling like a fool (and the continuing hiccups can themselves make the electrolyte situation worse). So it becomes time to take drastic measures.

It turns out that the smartest and fastest way to derail the hiccups themselves is to quickly increase the imbalance significantly. The intervention derived from this concept deals with (first) the most common one, the acidosis, and then, if that doesn't work, the less common one, the alkalosis. The fortunate thing is that all the raw materials are usually present in the average bar or restaurant, so you can cure yourself or a friend fast in one of the places where you're most likely to look like an idiot as you just sit there hiccuping and hiccuping.

(Part 1:) Juli got this one right. Take a large spoonful of sugar, dry, in the mouth, and let it dissolve. Some of the sugar gets absorbed directly through the buccal membrane of the mouth. The acidosis is kicked way further along, and your body, distracted by the sudden extreme change in the blood chemistry, "calls off" the hiccups as ineffective. It calls them off right away, too: within seconds. The "spoonful of sugar" approach, in my experience, works for about 60% of hiccuppers.

If this doesn't work, the hiccuper has a worse case of acidosis than mere sugar can deal with. So we take the intervention up a notch.

(Part 2:) Take one small spoonful of salt (the equivalent of a cooking teaspoon is plenty). Again, hold in the mouth and let it dissolve. It's gross, but in the next 20% of hiccupers, the hiccups will stop. Bang, right away.

If neither of these steps work, then your hiccuper is not in acidosis, but in alkalosis. So you switch tactics.

(Part 3:) Give the hiccuper a lemon slice and tell them to chew on it. Their hiccups will then vanish.

It is important to do these things in order and not try to cut back on the amounts of sugar and salt, or the intervention may fail and you'll wind up having to do it all over again, which is annoying, especially if you're on a low-sodium diet or just don't feel like retaining liters and liters of water the next day. But if you follow these instructions faithfully, the hiccups should vanish, pretty much without fail. You can get a real reputation as a miracle worker with this.

A side issue, henceforth possibly to be called Duane's Law of Embarrassment Anxiety: When you are running this routine on someone whose hiccups you absolutely have to stop because you'll fall very low in their estimation if you don't, they will always be alkalotic, and you will always have to run through all the stages, feeling dumber and more desperate every moment as you go along. (This law first became plain to me when I was de-hiccuping my "Science Challenge" producer at the BBC: if I hadn't proven I was good at the science part by curing him, well, you can imagine.)

And an afterthought: All other even slightly useful hiccup cures service this mechanism in one way or another, by quickly and emphatically changing the blood electrolyte balance. Scaring the person (causes acidosis: see The Andromeda Strain), drinking water upside down (forces the person to hold his/her breath, slowly increases the CO2 in the blood), breathing in a paper bag (rebreathing, ditto), whatever: they are all thin pale versions of the One True Cure, trying with greater or lesser effectiveness to shove the blood electrolytes around.

Now go all ye and spread the word, that there may be fewer hiccups in the world.

Googling for hiccups sugar turns up quite a few more hits.

My friend Raven knows far too much about prostates. She sent me this the other day.

Don't forget that conducting regular testicular self-exams (or getting someone else to do it for you :) is a very important part of keeping healthy. If detected early, testicular cancer is very curable:

http://tcrc.acor.org/tcexam.html

But you need to commit to doing it regularly, not to just doing it every once in a while, or when the mood strikes you.

Because as everyone knows, sometimes you like feeling nuts; sometimes, you don't.

And, on a not completely unrelated note, males with big testicles have smaller brains -- at least in the case of bats.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:23:26 GMT)

I've moved my blog again; this time to my own website. The new link is http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog/.

Last Wednesday night, Emma emailed a dozen of our friends, inviting them to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. One reply arrived the next morning. Then nothing.

By Sunday evening, I had grown exasperated enough to send out a snarky followup:

The courtesy of a belated reply would be appreciated. So far, we've got exactly one RSVP.

It served its purpose. Replies cascaded in. Most, alas, said "no"; they had other plans.

Would that this were an isolated incident. Time and again, I've issued invitations that were not responded to. A simple "yes" or "no" is ideal. A "maybe" is acceptable too, especially if you follow up with a "yes" or a "no".

RSVP is not a meaningless formality. It's a vital planning aid. I need to know ahead of time whether to expect three or thirteen for a dinner party. It's rude and thoughtless to leave me hanging in limbo. If I assume that everyone who's been invited will show up, and cater accordingly, and many of them don't come, I've gone to needless expense and effort. If I guess that only half those invited will turn up, and I underestimate, then I'm embarrassed by not being able to feed my guests properly.

It's almost as big a sin for you to say "yes", then fail to show, without a word of warning.

When the stakes are low, such as a large drinks party, the lack of RSVPs is a minor matter. For a major production, it's inconsiderate at best.

See what Thunderbird 1.5 RC 1's spelling checker flags as misspelled words.

Seems to be a known bug.

I finally updated my blog to run on dasBlog 1.8. Not too painful. I unzipped the binary distribution, downloaded the content folder from my server to my local drive, ran the provided upgrade utility, and used WinMerge to update the configuration files.

The most obvious change is that I'm using a new theme (skin), which gives the site a very different look. The previous default theme had problems if your browser window was too narrow, due to some hardcoded table sizes (I think).

I also figured out how to post to dasBlog via w.bloggar. I looked for info on configuring w.bloggar a few weeks ago, and couldn't find it then.

Followup: the multiword links in this post are mangled when they appear in a browser. I think this is an issue in dasBlog's XML transforms. Specifically, it only seems to happen when the multiword link contains "dasBlog": ego-surfing, perhaps. Reported as dasBlog bug 1354987.

Followup #2: the problem turned out to be one of the out-of-the box rewriting rules in site.config. Commenting out

  <ContentFilter find="dasBlog" ...

These rules seem to be generally useful. The default configuration allows you to convert several varieties of smilies to graphics:

:-o
:-S
:-D
:'(
;-)
:-)

as well as Google searches, $g(bush sucks) → bush sucks, and dictionary.com lookups, $d(defenestration) → defenestration. (The preceding examples were escaped by bracketing the first character in the pattern with a <span> tag.)

More details on ContentFilter at the new dasBlog documentation site, dasBlog.info.

Two weeks ago, I completed a year as a contractor at Microsoft. After the permatemps lawsuits, no contractor may work more than 12 months at Microsoft without taking a 100-day break. (Contractors are free to work elsewhere, of course, during the break.)

Emma quit her job at washington Mutual the same week in order to set up her own business. It will be months before she starts making money, so it seemed prudent for me to find a full-time job.

Last week, I interviewed with Amazon. This week, I interviewed with the group at Microsoft that I just left, Atlas DMT, and Google.

Microsoft and Atlas both made very attractive offers. This afternoon, I accepted the position of Senior Software Engineer at Atlas.

I had a very good year at Microsoft in Windows Emerging Markets. I did some really interesting work on an as-yet unannounced product (some day I hope to be able to talk about what I did) and I worked on a first-class team. I have two longtime friends on the team, Muhsin and Delf, and the three of us became very close to my officemate, Dipankar. Dipankar's contract ends next week; he received two offers of fulltime jobs from Microsoft this week, and he's accepted the position on the codec team.

While I very much liked the team and the product, I'm not nearly so keen on Microsoft the company. Between full-time employment and contracts, I've spent almost 10 out of the last 13 years at Microsoft, and that's more than enough. (It seems mildly ironic to be writing this on the day of the annual Microsoft Company Meeting, celebrating Microsoft's 30th anniversary.)

Atlas is a technology company, specializing in web advertising. I'm joining a team that's working on advertising in video-on-demand. I was very impressed by the team when I interviewed there on Wednesday, and they liked me too. They were a sharp bunch of guys who conducted a well-balanced series of interview that was both testing and welcoming.

The team has been using Scrum for a while and they've migrated towards XP, which they speak highly of. I've wanted to get first-hand experience in Agile development for years. They're also using C# and .NET. After 15 years of C and C++, I'm ready for managed code. They seem to be very committed to work/life balance. Not least, they're in the International District of downtown Seattle, 3 miles from my house. Every job I've had in my 13 years of living here has required me to commute across Lake Washington.

I learned a really clever trick at our workparty on Sunday.

We were using a dolly that we had borrowed from our neighbor Mary to haul a heavy credenza up from the basement. One of the tires was flat, which made the exercise even more difficult.

I got out my bicycle floor pump and started pumping, but it was a waste of time. The tire was tubeless and without any air, so it just slipped loosely around the rim. After a few minutes of futility, Dale remembered something he had seen years before at a gas station.

He got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge, and coated the metal rim and both rims of the tire with soapy water. This created a film which held the air in. Once there was a little air inside the tire, it started inflating when I pumped and the rim of the tire pushed against the metal rim, creating an airtight seal. After that, it was only a minute's work to bring the tire up to the recommended 30psi.

I mentioned recently that I would be walking in this year's AIDS Walk. And so I did.

After months of dry, sunny weather in Seattle, I have grown unaccustomed to rain. It was an unpleasant morning and an unpleasant shock. The skies opened and I stood in an endless line waiting to register. I raised $1180, which entitled me to huddle in the VIP tent, as the rain continued. The rain finally let up about halfway along the route, as we debouched onto Broadway.

Thanks to my fellow Team BiNet Seattle fundraisers, Emily and Meghan, who raised a few hundred more between them. Double thanks to Emily for giving me a ride home afterwards.

My good friend Frank Maloney turned 60 the other day. A few months ago, he invited Emma and me to join him and his partner, Lyndol, at The Herbfarm. The Herbfarm is one of the very best restaurants in the Seattle area. Certainly one of the most expensive.

Frank brought us to The Herbfarm, but not at his own expense. One of Frank's college roommates was Ron Zimmerman, the owner of The Herbfarm, and Ron had invited Frank to bring Lyndol and two guests over for his 60th birthday. Ron semi-seriously credits Frank with introducing him to good wine, when Frank was a sommelier in the Seventies.

We had a marvelous time. This was our first visit. It won't be our last, but dinner runs nearly $200 per person, so we'll never be regulars.

The Herbfarm is in the Sammamish River valley, right next to the Red Hook Brewery, near Woodinville. The building looks like a traditional farmhouse, though I'm sure it was recently built. Inside, it's both cosy and elegant, with some eccentric touches in the dining room.

Dinner is an all-evening experience with a nine-course dinner. We arrived not long after six, and left just after midnight. On arrival, we toured the premises, finding Ron in his alarmingly well-stocked wine cellar.

At six-thirty, Carrie Van Dyck, Ron's wife, brought the forty or so guests on a tour of the herb garden, describing the herbs that were to be featured in that evening's menu. She told us how to grow each herb, passing out fresh samples of herbs, including lemon thyme, lemon geranium, lemon basil, and anise hyssop. We also saw the truffling pigs and the ducks they keep in one corner of the garden.

We sat down at seven, starting out with small servings of crab soup, mussels, and baby corn. I detest fish -- I cannot stand the smell or the taste -- so I passed the soup and mussels on to Emma and Frank, who were more than happy to have my share.

After we had finished the first course, Ron brought out his chef, Jerry Traunfeld, and they launched into a long description of both that night's menu and upcoming menus, paying particular attention to the wines. They concluded by introducing the dozen or so staff. I've never seen such a full-blown introduction to dinner, but they had a lot to talk about, and it lived up to the promise.

The next course was smoked black cod, which I passed on to Frank, but not before nibbling on a corner of it. Every couple of years, I give in to my companions and try a piece of some highly recommended fish dish. As always, it did nothing for me, but everyone else liked theirs. I comforted myself with the two different Chardonnays that were served with the cod. My life would be simpler if I weren't so averse to fish.

After that point, all the food was to my liking. There followed a goat cheese ravioli with figs, which was succeeded by a grilled squab. We washed that down with apple-shiso ice.

I love lamb, and I greatly enjoyed the loin of lamb. The cheese that followed was a fine blend of sharp and nutty.

I was starting to flag at this point, from all the wine and food, but I gamely took on the desserts: a small cone of ice cream and a peach cobbler.

The final two courses were coffee and small treats with madeira. I couldn't face the latter, but we boxed them up, and I just ate a couple now.

Throughout the evening, Ron was a gracious and thoughtful host, paying particular attention to our table.

Many years ago, Frank published a small volume of poetry called How to Eat a Slug.

Imagine our delight when Ron produced a chocolate slug.

Frank had been very sick earlier in the summer and we had wondered for a while if he would be well enough to go. His health is still not good, but he was well enough to thoroughly enjoy a truly memorable evening.

Here's to many more birthdays, Frank!

On Saturday 10th September 2005, over 8,000 people will participate in the Northwest AIDS Foundation Walk. I will be one of them, as I have been every year since 1992.

To sponsor me, please visit my Donation Page.

I had originally signed up to march with Team Microsoft. Then we in BiNet Seattle decided to form a team. Please join Team BiNet Seattle: we'd love to have you.

It's been more than 20 years since AIDS was first recognized. AIDS is still wreaking devastation in Africa and Asia, and affecting many in the U.S. Although the new protease inhibitors are helping many people in the West, the AIDS epidemic is far from over. For one thing, the new drugs are not a cure. When they work well, they enable people with AIDS to lead an active life and live much longer than before. But one-third of people with access to medical treatment do not respond to that treatment. The new drugs are horrendously expensive (about $15,000 per year), so they're out of reach of 95% of the people living with AIDS around the world. (Recently, the large pharmaceutical companies have come to some agreements to make their drugs available at much cheaper rates in the Third World, but millions of people still have no access to the drugs.) Furthermore, somewhere between 550 and 1,100 Washingtonians are infected every year, one-quarter of them under the age of 22. More than 85% of the people diagnosed with AIDS in Washington State since 1995 are still alive---a marked improvement on the situation before the protease inhibitors became available. All of this means that there's a continuing need for money to help fight the epidemic.

In addition to funding the Lifelong AIDS Alliance's own services, the money raised will be distributed to other AIDS organizations throughout Washington State. The Lifelong AIDS Alliance (formerly the Northwest AIDS Foundation and the Chicken Soup Brigade) provides a variety of services to HIV+ people and people living with AIDS in Washington: Food, housing, rent subsidies, in-home care, groceries, educational material, and much more. See http://www.lifelongaidsalliance.org for more details.

If you'd like to walk yourself, please visit http://www.aidswalk2005.org. If you work for a company, such as Microsoft, that matches charitable contributions, be sure to list your company name.

I thank you, Lifelong AIDS Alliance thanks you, and the people your donation will help thank you.

I'm taking a beginner's drawing class at North Seattle Community College. Today, we started on perspective. We began by watching a 45-minute video by David Hockney, where he contrasts three paintings: a Canaletto painting of Venice, and two Chinese scrolls painted 70 years apart.

The Canaletto is a classic two-point linear perspective painting. Both of the Chinese scrolls show trips by the emperor along the Grand Canal. The first one, by Wang Hui, is 27 inches high and 72 feet wide! It uses multiple perspective to show scenes, in a manner that is strange to my Western eyes. Hockney demonstrates how effective it is. For example, he shows a corner where two streets meet at right angles. On the "up" street, the viewer is on the left, looking right, at the left side of the houses; on the street coming from the left, we see the right side of the houses. I've made it sound like a mess but it works. The scroll is a marvel of teeming humanity in tiny detail. Most of the figures are scarcely larger than Hockney's fingernail.

He contrasts it unfavorably with a scroll painted of a similar trip by the emperor's grandson, after Western missionaries had imported their notions of perspective. The second scroll is flat and lifeless, though the perspective is more "correct" to our eyes.

Worth seeing if you can find a copy.

For the last three years, I've been involved with The Wild Geese Players of Seattle, an amateur group that does readings of Irish literature, particularly the works of James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Our big event every year is Bloomsday, June 16th, commemorating Joyce's Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. It's a tale of a Jewish everyman, Leopold Bloom, wandering through Dublin one day, and of the young writer (and Joyce's alter ego), Stephen Dedalus. We're working our way through the book, reading a chapter or two each year. In this, our eighth year, we'll be reading Chapter 11, Sirens, at the Brechemin Auditorium in the School of Music at the University of Washington, on Thursday 16th and Saturday 18th. Congressman Jim McDermott will be reading the part of Bloom on the Saturday.

Last year and this year, I have been the assistant dramaturge, helping to turn chapters into a script to be read by 15-20 readers. In previous years, the director made a photocopy of the book, wrote attributions ("Narrator 1", "Bloom", "Stephen", etc) on the paper, then photocopied that text and handed it out to the readers. Since the script was a moving target, everyone ended up with a set of scruffy, tatty, inconsistently hand-annotated sheets. It was a mess.

I knew there had to be a better way. Now, we've adapted the etext of the 1922 Paris Edition, prepared by Project Gutenberg, which saves a lot of typing. The script is marked up in XML and styled with XSLT to produce an HTML page. After a rehearsal or two, when it's apparent that the script isn't quite right, it's an easy matter to make a few changes, render fresh HTML, and print new scripts.

The XSLT required is fairly straightforward. About the only mildly interesting thing is defining one template in terms of another; e.g., I want all the speakers to share the same styling, so I defined a parameterized speaker template:

<xsl:template name="speaker">
    <xsl:param name="name" />
    <div class="speaker">
        <span class="speaker"><xsl:value-of select="$name"/>: </span>
        <xsl:apply-templates />
    </div>
</xsl:template>

which is called thus:

<xsl:template match="bloom">
    <xsl:call-template name="speaker">
        <xsl:with-param name="name">Bloom</xsl:with-param>
    </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>

The real challenge in preparing the script is dramaturgical. Ulysses is a notoriously difficult and dense text, woven through with Bloom's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. Each chapter is written in a different style. Sirens, for example, has musical themes running through it, and we'll be accompanied by a piano player this year.

What would you do with this?

Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle. Hear.

Here's what we came up with:

Or with this paragraph?

--Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is. Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper, envelope: unconcerned. It's so characteristic.

We chose this:

We ended up with three narrators in this chapter: N1 deals with Bloom, primarily; N2 is mostly for Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, the siren barmaids; and N3 handles the other characters.

Lest I scare you off, much of the chapter is quite clear and often very funny, even for people who are unfamiliar with the book.

The James Joyce Portal is a good starting point for matters Joycean.

I've set up a new personal blog at www.georgevreilly.com/blog. I'll be posting non-technical stuff there and I'll be cross-posting on technical matters to Weblogs @ ASP.net. Here's how I ended up running dasBlog on the new blog.

In the spring of last year, I attempted to install both .Text and dasBlog on my XP Pro laptop. I failed, signally, to get either one working. The details have mercifully faded with time, leaving me only with a residue of frustration.

I've been meaning to put some photos of mine up on the web for a while. A week ago, I went to download nGallery, as I remembered hearing good things about it in the past. I learned that nGallery is now part of Community Server (as is .Text). After navigating through the somewhat confusing portal, I downloaded a copy of Community Server 1.0.

Then I spent several frustrating hours trying to get it running on my laptop. Community Server requires a SQL Server back-end, but you can also use MSDE, the standalone Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine, which comes without a GUI. I downloaded MSDE and the SQL Web Data Administrator, as well as MSDE Query. I can spell "SQL", but that's about where my knowledge of SQL stops. I tried to follow the instructions to create the database tables. I did manage to create the master table, but I could not figure out how to set the various permissions that the instructions demanded. I googled extensively and looked through the archived forums at CommunityServer.org and SqlJunkies.com, to no avail.

Really! If I can't figure this stuff out, most people are never going to get Community Server running on their own systems. Don't get me wrong. Community Server/.Text is a good blogging system, if you can surmount the barriers to entry. I'm a competent, skilled developer, but I've never needed to learn SQL, and I wasn't motivated enough to dig further.

(I've since realized that my hosting package at iHostSites includes MySql, but not SQL Server, so this would have been all for naught. I think. Double aargh!)

I gave up on Community Server in frustration, and decided to fall back to nGallery. I got nGallery installed and running easily enough. Alas, it was flaky and it was all too easy to get ASP.net throwing unhandled exceptions back at me. I spend too much of my life troubleshooting other people's bugs, and I wasn't prepared to invest any more time on this avenue.

At this point, I googled for "web album software" and came up with JAlbum. I'm much happier with JAlbum. It worked flawlessly as soon as I ran it and it's versatile. Photos will start appearing on my personal website, www.GeorgeVReilly.com, soon.

Yesterday, I decided to give dasBlog another try. That was altogether more successful. I did not manage to get it running on my laptop, but I did get it running on a XP Pro desktop system, as well as on my public website. I did have a little difficulty getting it to run on my desktop system, but that went away as soon as I ran aspnet_regiis -i to reset ASP.net.

I'm not sure why it doesn't run on my laptop, but the enormous amount of stuff that I've installed on this system surely plays a role. Indeed that may have been the reason why nGallery puked on my laptop. Someday, I'm going to have to flatten the system and reinstall only the important stuff.

Net results:

Album software: JAlbum 1, nGallery 0.

Blogging software: dasBlog 1, Community Server 0.

This is my third blog. I've had a technical blog at Weblogs @ ASP.NET for the last year, and a defunct blog at EraBlog for another year.

I've been meaning to set up a blog at my personal website for a while, one that allows me to post about anything that I feel like. Posting about non-technical matters is discouraged at Weblogs.asp.net.

So here it is. (Assuming I've set it up correctly) I will be cross-posting technical posts to weblogs.asp.net. Other posts will appear here exclusively.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:47:24 GMT)

After several months of not blogging, I've decided to resume. EraBlog was nice while it lasted, but Mike Amundsen hasn't been paying attention to it for a while. I was always frustrated at the lack of configurability, and I hated the hard-coded limit of three posts showing up on the front page.

I've moved to http://weblogs.asp.net/george_v_reilly/.

Update: See next post. I've long since moved to GeorgeVReilly.com/blog.

(Originally posted to Personal at EraBlog on Sat, 11 Oct 2003 18:15:39 GMT)

I have gout. It's an unpleasant form of arthritis. Once or twice a year, one of my lower joints will swell up overnight. Usually, it's struck one of my knees, though the last few attacks have all been in my feet. The knee attacks have all been extremely painful initially and I've required prescription painkillers to get to sleep at night. Just bending my knee a few degrees is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat. Fortunately, after a few days, the pain decreases to the point where it's annoying but tolerable.

Oddly, the feet attacks have been less painful. I had a few premonitory twinges in my right foot on Thursday evening, so I took a colchicine tablet. I woke up early yesterday morning to find my foot hurting. I can bend my big toe upwards, but it hurts to lift off from my right foot, so I'm hobbling around stiff-footed with the help of a cane. I can drive, but I don't think I could manage it it were my left foot, since the clutch requires more pressure than the accelerator or brake pedals.

This is the first time that I've had a gout attack in my right foot. I had one in my left foot three weeks ago, the day that we were flying back from our vacation in Ireland. I had only one attack in my left foot before that, just as we were about to leave for a two-week driving vacation over last Thanksgiving. Fortunately, the anti-inflammatories brought it under control quickly. Before that, I've had four or five attacks, always in one knee or the other, over the last five years. I've never yet had an attack in the classic locus of the big toe.

Gout is caused an excess of uric acid forming crystals in a joint. Uric acid is a by-product of the breakdown of purines. High levels of uric acid are due to one or more of three factors: consuming too much food which is high in purines, the body generates too many purines, or the body is not effective at eliminating purines.

I have never consumed significant quantities of the foods that are really high in purines, such as organ meats and shellfish, and my consumption of alcohol is quite modest. I'm probably twenty-five pounds over my ideal weight, my blood pressure is fine, and I'm in my late thirties, so I don't really fit the stereotype of a fat sweaty squire, quaffing port by the gallon, a la Hogarth. My doctors have been telling me for over a decade that I have a high concentration of uric acid in my blood.

Some people have a genetic predisposition to gout. My father had an attack a few years ago. My mother's sister reportedly had an attack once or twice, but she's a hypochondriac who's had everything.

I spent most of September and October 2002 limping around because my left knee was swollen due to gout. I couldn't participate in last year's Northwest AIDS Walk, because I couldn't walk very far. I had expected to walk in this year's AIDS Walk, which is tomorrow, but it's unlikely that I'll be up for it.

For more background on gout, see the gout factsheet, the Gout FAQ, the Health A-Z Encyclopedia, or Forbes: The Disease of Kings.

(Originally posted to Home at EraBlog on Fri, 25 Jul 2003 06:50:20 GMT)

As I mentioned in my Toastmasters' speech about naturalization, I decided on September 11th, 2002 to become a U.S. citizen.

This morning, I had my interview with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS, formerly known as the INS).

This afternoon, I was sworn in as a U.S. citizen at the Seattle INS Office. Eighty-three other new citizens were sworn in at the same time. Many were Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, or Eastern European. Only three others, all Brits, were from Western Europe. We were gathered into a stuffy room with an overflow crowd of relatives and friends. It was not a deeply moving ceremony, but it was clear that most of us were sincerely glad to become Americans. If my interview had come a month sooner, I would have chosen to participate in the massive July 4th ceremony at the Seattle Center.

Woohoo! Now I get a vote for the first time since 1986. As my youngest brother Mark, who became a citizen last year, just told me, I now have an opportunity to get the Bush kleptocracy out of office.

(Originally posted to Personal at EraBlog on Tue, 22 Apr 2003 16:04:19 GMT)

I've been too busy in the last few weeks to post anything here. Mostly because I've been busy with work. Partially because I'm too disgusted with Iraq to say anything useful: Win the war and lose the peace. Feh!

In the last few days, I've been at home taking care of Emma. On Friday morning, she had a Morton's neuroma removed from her left foot. A nerve running through the space between a couple of her toes had become enlarged to about a centimeter in diameter, and it had been causing her a lot of pain. She wasn't able to stand or walk for more than 20 minutes without discomfort, which rapidly grew worse the longer she stayed on her feet. It first became a serious problem when we were in Ireland during Christmas 2001, when her foot gave out on Christmas Day. She was in great pain and spent the rest of the vacation on crutches.

For the first week or so, she has to keep her foot elevated as much as possible, and she's under doctor's orders not to put any weight on it. Even if she were inclined to flout the orders, any time that she's accidentally jolted it has been intensely painful. I'm staying home for a few days to help nurse her.

After she goes back to work, I'm still going to have to look after her for the next six-to-eight weeks. She's supposed to minimize the amount of walking or standing that she does, which means that she can't wait for the bus and she can't drive, so I'll have to bring her to and from work. I'll also have to bring her to physical therapy several times a week.

She's bearing up well, considering the amount of pain that she's been in and the frustration she feels at being able to do so little for herself. I dislike seeing her in pain, so I'm looking forward to the time that she'll be able to walk comfortably again.