10/29. In mid-October, I shaved off the goatee that I had sported since March, leaving me clean-shaven for the first time in a decade. I quickly got over that urge and let the beard start growing back.

This is me at the two-week stage: a self-portrait taken while experimenting with the new camera. It looks a little odd to me. I'm using this as the startup photo on the camera.

10/30. I go back and forth between Atlas's offices at Pioneer Square and the International District, and Smith Tower is a major landmark.

10/31. Once again, we got dozens and dozens of young callers at Halloween. I have a set of Halloween photos at Flickr.

11/01. This is taken from the roof of Atlas's office Occidental Square, looking at the building on the other side of the street.

11/02. Tres works in the group that I'm loaned out to, Atlas Publisher. He has a certain sartorial flair. He also turns out to be a friend of Sparky.

11/03. Occidental Square at dusk.

About six weeks ago, I read about Sparky's A Picture a Day project on his blog. He in turn had been inspired by Photojojo's Project 365.

Here's how it works, for me. I take at least one photo a day, every single day for a year. Every so often, I upload the photos to my Flickr site. If I get more than one worthwhile photo in a day, great, but one and only gets tagged potd (picture of the day).

Why? Apart from the reasons enumerated by Photojojo, here's what I get out of it.

First of all, fun. It adds a little spark to my day, to be always looking for photo ops.

Second, the constant practice makes me a better photographer.

Third, more photo editing and photo organization. Historically, I have been much better about taking photos than I have about organizing them and editing them. This should get me off my duff about going through the thousands of photos I've taken since I went digital in 2001, and posting the best of them.

Before I was inspired to start this project, I had been thinking about getting a small point-and-shoot, like the Casio Exilim. When my parents stayed with us and went to Hawaii with us a month before, I had played with my mother's Exilim and liked it. My father had also had me order another Exilim as a present for Michelle, and I had carried that around for a week.

I bought myself a Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 at CostCo. It's 10 megapixels, which I think is overkill, but even so, I can get more than 700 photos on to a 2GB card. It came with a leather carrying case, now a fulltime resident on my belt. I'm fairly happy with it, and I think I've got some good results from it. But judge for yourself.

I love my other camera, a Nikon D70 digital SLR, but it's far too bulky and heavy to carry with me all the time.

I finally uploaded the first 36 pictures to Flickr last night, after working on them for most of the weekend. It would have been sooner, but we spent 2.5 weeks in Ireland with wholly inadequate Internet access, and I was quite busy before then.

From now on, I hope to post new POTD pictures two or three times a week.

The next few posts will talk about those first 36 photos in more detail. I also intend to write up the workflow that I'm developing.

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.

SysInternals has always been a source of great tools for troubleshooting your system. FileMon, RegMon, Process Explorer, Handle, ListDlls, PsTools, DebugView: all of these have earned a permanent place on my Windows installations. Mark Russinovich, the co-founder, is a world-class hacker. He co-wrote Microsoft Windows Internals without access to the Windows source. It was he who discovered the Sony Rootkit and publicized it on his widely read blog.

Many people were somewhat disturbed to learn that Microsoft bought SysInternals a few months ago, that it would compromise the tools.

It seems not to be a problem. The tools have just been re-released on the TechNet SysInternals site. There's one new tool, ProcMon, which aggregates together FileMon, RegMon, and a process monitor. And they've made the whole suite available as one zipfile, instead of having to download each tool separately.

This video says it all.

Go vote tomorrow!

I've seen a number of references to a Microsoft demo of speech recognition that went famously wrong, but it wasn't until this evening that I finally watched the CNBC Video that started the meme.

A TV reporter makes a snarky introduction then cuts to video of a Microsoft PM demoing the new speech recognition technology in Windows Vista. Dear Mom comma, he says. Dear aunt, appears in Word. It gets worse from there. Funny stuff. Go watch the original video.

But it's not the whole story. There's another video which sets the demo in context. Overall, the demo was reasonably successful and the speech commands worked fairly well.

If you think people talking into their cellphones is annoying now, wait until you hear them talking at their computers!

"This isn't an election anymore, it's an intervention."

— Andrew Sullivan on CNN.

I don't have much time for either Andrew Sullivan or Christopher Hitchens. Both of them bear a lot of blame for getting us into Iraq in the first place.

But here they are on CNN yesterday, ripping into Bush for saying that Rumsfeld is doing a fabulous job and that he and Cheney must stay until the end of his presidency.

(Via AmericaBlog)

For the last few months, every blog post that I've made has been accompanied by at least one image. Sometimes I already have an appropriate image. The rest of the time, I use whatever I could find after searching Google Images.

Earlier today, I came across 10 Tips for Google Image Search. I particularly like the Greasemonkey script which allows you to view the original image by clicking on the thumbnail.

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.

I've up loaded my Halloween pictures to Flickr.

Windows deservedly gets a lot of bad press about the unending stream of security updates. But Linux, despite all of the propaganda about it being more secure than Windows, has its own security problems.

Take this post from LWN.net yesterday:

No security updates today
[Posted October 25, 2006 by corbet]

It is sad that this is worthy of note, but it is: on this day, Wednesday, October 25, we have not received a single security update for any Linux distribution.

(This post was composed on a laptop running Kubuntu 6.06.)

I found a series of amusing cat pictures, via Ned Batchelder's blog.

Update 2007/10/04: That site is gone, but fairly similar photos can be found at LOLCats.

My operatic education continues. Tonight we saw the Seattle Opera's production of The Italian Girl in Algiers, aka L'italiana in Algeri .

The plots in opera, especially comedic opera, are always wildly improbable. This one revolves around Mustafà, the buffoonish Bey of Algiers, who wants to pass off his wife Elvira to Lindoro, an Italian slave, and take instead the newly arrived Italian girl, Isabella. Isabella has come in search of her lost love -- Lindoro, of course -- and has brought another lover, Taddeo, also a buffoon, who poses as her uncle. Isabella is more than a match for every man who crosses her path, twisting them around her little finger.

The performances are delightful and the music is a treat. Mustafà, the petulant Bey, as played by Simone Alberghini, is particularly funny. Recommended.

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?

In the past few weeks, I've received not one but two letters from Christine Gregoire, the governor of Washington State, looking for support in re-electing her. The thing is, is that she's running in 2008, not 2006.

I threw away the first one. On the second one, I wrote something like this and mailed it back:

If this had come in December, I have been willing to support you. But not six weeks from a high-stakes election. What the hell are you thinking? Don't bother me again before 2008.

Sheer idiocy. Why would anyone send her money at the moment, instead of making donations towards the mid-term elections?

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.

I just sent the following letter to my senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, as well as to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Letter Page :

How has America come to this? Is the United States of America truly about to repudiate the Geneva Convention? Is the Senate about to let the President decide when and whom to torture?

This is foul. This is wholly un-American. This is deeply immoral. Every civilized society abhors torture.

How can we claim to be spreading Democracy in the Middle East at the same time that we commit torture? Are we to lose all of our moral standing in the eyes of the world under this wretched Administration?

Tell me that we're better than this. Please!

Senator, you must oppose this wholeheartedly. Do not let it come to a vote on the floor of the Senate.

Via AmericaBlog, an amusing video of a cockroach taking on a weatherman. Twice.

I ran into a problem installing some COM+ components today. The installer was using Regsvcs.exe to register each COM+ component. I noticed after a while that the installer wasn't making any progress and that my dual-proc system was stuck at 50% CPU utilization. I attached a debugger to the offending process, regsvcs, and found that it was stuck in the following infinite loop (disassembly courtesy of Reflector):

 internal void System.EnterpriseServices.CatalogSync.Wait()
 {
   if (this._set)
   {
     RegistryKey key1
       = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey("SOFTWARE\\Classes\\CLSID");
     while (true)
     {
       int num1 = (int) key1.GetValue("CLBVersion", 0);
       if (num1 != this._version)
       {
         break;
       }
       Thread.Sleep(0);
     }
     this._set = false;
   }
 }

There are two severe problems with this code.

1. The loop should time out. There must be some reasonable limit after which you can incontrovertibly say that something must have gone wrong, and throw an exception. There has to be some way to terminate a loop.

2. Never use Sleep(0) in a loop. Sleep(0) yields the processor only if there's a runnable thread. If there isn't, Sleep(0) will return immediately. If the code is sitting in a tight loop, the net effect is that it will maximize the CPU until the thread's quantum is exhausted. There are no other runnable threads, so the scheduler immediately starts this thread again. This code will run until your CPU burns out.

(And, yes, I have committed both of these sins in shipping code. Why do you ask?)

I don't know what the calling code is doing or why CLBVersion isn't being altered by some other thread or process. I had to use RegEdit to modify this value to get the loop to terminate, whereupon RegSvcs immediately did its work and terminated. And then it started all over again, with the next invocation of RegSvcs on another COM+ component. I don't know if the components are really installed properly. I had to leave at that point.

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!

Nine-Eleven. The date burned into everyone's brain. One of those dates where everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. Emma and I awoke to the radio telling us that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. We went downstairs and watched the TV in horror.

For a time, an all-too-brief time, the country pulled together in a show of unity and grief. The world joined us in an outpouring of support.

There are many reasons why history will condemn George Bush, but one of the most serious is his squandering that good will for quick partisan advantage. A better man could have built a bipartisan consensus to tackle terrorism in a serious way. Ask not what your country can do for you -- just go shopping.

He should have finished the job in Afghanistan. Instead, his attention turned to fomenting the irrational, immoral Iraq war, which turned the world against us.

In many ways, the terrorists have won. This country slides slowly towards a police state, as Bush arrogates imperial powers to himself. Bush and bin Laden have a symbiotic relationship. Bush has turned Iraq into a recruiting ground for Al Qaeda. Bin Laden is the ever-threatening boogeyman to scare the American people.