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.

I made this recipe for Thanksgiving. It was a big hit.

Mustard-Mushroom Soup recipe from CDKitchen.com:

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup butter

• 2 pounds mushrooms, thinly sliced

• 4 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)

• 1/2 cup dry Sherry

• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard

• Salt and freshly ground pepper

• 1 cup whipping cream

Directions

Melt butter in heavy large saucepan over medium-high heat and cook until lightly browned. Add mushrooms and cook until liquid evaporates, stirring frequently, about 10 minutes. Add stock, Sherry and mustard and simmer briskly 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add cream and warm through. Serve immediately.

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.

vi. Vee-eye. My text editor of choice for 20 years. Half my life.

Why? Because I imprinted on vi, like a duckling on its mother. Vi's keystrokes are bound into my muscle memory. My fingers reflexively use vi keystrokes to move around, to delete text, to move blocks, to find patterns. I don't have to think about using dw to delete a word, or n to find the next match of a pattern, or yG to yank the rest of a file, or j to move down a line, or . to repeat the last modification. My subconcious does it for me.

I don't even have to think much about more complex commands, like ct) to replace a parameter list, or simpler regexp replacements. I've internalized so many vi idioms in the last two decades.

For nearly all editing tasks, I'm far more productive when I use vi. Like Tom Christiansen, I can become at one with the machine.

People who've used vi fall into a bimodal distribution. They love it or they hate it. Usually, it's because of vi's modal nature. I love the orthogonality of the UI.

20 years

In the autumn of 1985, I entered my third year of Computer Science at Trinity. We were promoted from three hours a day on the 1200-baud terminals in the basement to all-day usage of the 9600-baud terminals in the main terminal room. We also graduated from the wretched SOS line editor to vi running on Eunice (a Unix emulator for VAX/VMS). I don't think I took to it instantly; it took a little while for it to grow on me. Soon enough, though, I was hooked on regexps.

Hitting ESC quickly became a habit: one that causes me occasional grief, when I reflexively hit ESC after entering text in an edit field in some app or other, and destroy what I've just written.

Two years later, I got my first fulltime job, writing a full-screen text editor for a small Irish typesetting company, ICPC. It was a replacement for the in-house line-based editor used by the data entry keyboaders, which I wrote in Vax Pascal. A friend made me aware of VITPU, a Vi emulator written in VMS's TPU, which I gladly latched onto.

Two years after that, I entered the Master's program at Brown, where I first got to use Unix and X Windows. Naturally, I used vi, but it was a lot less powerful than GNU Emacs, which was very popular. In time, I learned of VIP, a vi emulator for Emacs. I began using VIP and quickly forsook standard vi. I liked having the power and customizability of Emacs, though I never learned to like the Emacs keybindings. (François Pinard, a longtime Emacs user, writes eloquently of why he moved to Vim.)

I stayed with VIP for years, as it evolved into Viper. I show up in the Viper credits for occasional contributions.

In 1992, I moved to Seattle and worked for Microsoft for the first time. I kept my Emacs+Viper habit.

By 1995, I was working for MicroCrafts and had discovered Vim. Version 3.x ran on DOS as a 16-bit command-line app. I used it occasionally on NT. Then I discovered that Roger Knobbe had ported Vim to NT, but that it was pretty buggy. I fixed the bugs and submitted my fixes to Bram Moolenaar, Vim's author.

One thing led to another, and I became the Win32 guy for Vim 4.x. Console-mode Vim became rock solid on NT 4, but I never got it to the same level on Win95, due to inherent problems in the console APIs on Win9x. I also put together a proof-of-concept implementation of gvim 5.0 for Windows. At that point, I gave up active involvement in the development of Vim: I had moved back to Microsoft, I was starting to date Emma, and I was working on the Beginning ATL COM Programming book. Something had to give.

I continued using Viper for much of the time that I was developing Vim, because Vim was not then rich enough for my needs. After Vim got a scripting language (VimL) and syntax highlighting in version 5, I started using Vim more and more. I think it's been five years since I last used Emacs, and I never got beyond GNU Emacs 19.34.

Recently, I've stopped using Vim as my exclusive programming editor, and I've been alternating between Vim and Visual Studio plus Resharper, as I've started doing a lot of .NET development. But more on that some other time. This post is already too long.

Via DailyKos, the 25 Dumbest Quotes of 2005. Includes such gems as:

• 13) "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god… Anything specific I need to do or tweak? Do you know of anyone who dog-sits? … Can I quit now? Can I come home? … I'm trapped now, please rescue me." --Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown, in various emails to colleagues and friends in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina
• 2) "Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?" --House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005

As the Twelve Days of Christmas approach, it's time once again to make fun of them. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't start until December 25th, the first day of Christmas, but the Xmas season starts earlier every year.

My favorite has long been Frank Kelly's Christmas Countdown, which was a big hit in Ireland and Britain in the early 1980s. It's couched as twelve increasingly alarmed letters from Gobnait O'Lughnasy to his friend Nuala. Here's Day Six:

Nuala,

What are you trying to do to us ? It isn’t that we don’t appreciate your generosity but the six geese have not alone nearly murdered the calling birds but they laid their eggs on top of the vet’s head from the pear-tree and his bill was £68 in cash ! My mother is munching 60 grains of Valium a day and talking to herself in a most alarming way. You must keep your feelings for me in check.

Gobnait

The rest of the lyrics can be found on the Highland Shepherd site. An audio version of the song can be found on the Denver Gaels Audio Clips Page. And an explanation of the traditional lyrics can be found at Carols.org.uk.

Harold Pinter's speech on accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

Via del.icio.us/popular, it's dozens of Bunny Suicides! Very twisted.

Update: Apparently, these are pirated scans from The Book of Bunny Suicides.

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.

I cannot look at a 16-digit credit card number and tell whether I've mistyped it or not. And neither can anyone else. I can, however, easily examine four separate four-digit numbers and spot typos.

1341329913245890 or 1341 3299 1324 5890? The choice is obvious. Yet most websites will not accept anything but the 16-digit string. It's a trivial matter to strip the spaces and normalize the credit card number, and it speaks to the incompetence of many website developers that they don't do this. The cognitive burden should be pushed onto the programmer, not the user.

On a related note, Irish people write phone numbers as a seven-digit string. I can't parse 6274986 at a glance either, but I can parse the US-style form, 627-4986.

Via the Win Tech Off Topic mailing list, I learned about Pandora earlier today. It's an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.

You create stations in Pandora by telling it an artist or song that you like. It starts playing music that it thinks you will like, based on its reasonably extensive database of carefully characterized music. You can tell it if you particularly like or dislike its selections, to guide its future offerings on that station. You can have up to 100 personalized stations.

So far, it's doing a good job.

(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/.

I was looking up the credits of Intermission on IMDB, then decided to look up my brother, David Reilly, the actor of the family. I found him.

I couldn't find any IMDB listing for my other brother, Mark Reilly, the filmmaker.

Then I looked up my own name. I wasn't there, of course, but I did find Der Spleen des George Riley, a German TV production of a Tom Stoppard play, Enter a Free Man.

I did quite a bit of work for Irish television in the mid-to-late Eighties, but it was all behind the scenes computer graphics work for such timeless gems as Murphy's Micro Quiz'M, Rapid Roulette, the Carroll's Irish Open, and the weather maps. The only thing that was of lasting value was Live Aid. The weather display software was still in use for most of the Nineties, so I can honestly say that my work has been widely seen by millions of people. I don't think my name ever appeared in the credits, though, just that of my then employer, Lendac.

Via DailyKos, Will Ferrell as Dubya making a Special Announcement on Global Warming.

Via Larry Osterman, Triumph the Comic Dog delivering the weather forecast in Hawai`i. Very apropos, after yesterday's snow in Seattle.

Via Emma.

I'm indifferent to most fantasy books, but I've been a fan of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, since I read the first book, A Game of Thrones, in 1997. I read the second book A Clash of Kings, in 1999. The third book A Storm of Swords came out five years ago, and I've been awaiting the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, ever since. After several postponements, it's finally out.

It's an epic tale of love, war, and intrigue. Five Kings are fighting for control, by sword, by guile, and sometimes by magic. Strange creatures are rising in the frozen North, beyond the Wall. Dragons are reappearing in the South. The young Starks, separated by fate and a cruel author, strive in vain to reunite. The Lannisters, mad and bad, seek to dominate.

I'm re-reading the series and rediscovering how good it is. The characters are clearly drawn, the plotting first rate, the writing excellent.

George R.R. Martin is on a book tour of the U.S. and appears at the University of Washington Bookstore on Monday, November 21st, at 7pm.