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.

We saw a production of David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries at the Bathhouse Theater tonight. Funny stuff.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Greenlake Bluwater Restaurant to get a spot of dinner. We both ordered Tuscan White Bean soup for a starter, Emma had the Turkey Pot Pie, and mine was the Fettucine.

The soup was fine and my fettucine was okay. Emma's pot pie had problems. The potatoes were raw and it had a funny lemony aftertaste. She pushed the plate away and waited for the waitress to come by. The waitress apologized and brought Emma the menu. Emma opted for the meatloaf, since that would come quickly. The manager apologized and offered us a free dessert.

The meatloaf arrived promptly and Emma was happy with it for a while. Then she got into the center and it was all but raw. At this point, she gave up on the grounds that it wasn't her night. The manager came over to apologize again and told us there would be no charge for the meal.

We left a tip—the service was attentive—but I don't think we'll be back. We've never had a really good meal at any of their restaurants, and none of them are particularly convenient for us.

Title: Dead to Me

Author: Anton Strout

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Publisher: Ace

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0441015786

Pages: 356

Keywords: urban fantasy, comedy

Reading period: 1–4 December, 2008

Simon Canderous, dorky newbie at the underfunded, secretive Department of Extraordinary Affairs in New York City, investigates the death of a beautiful ghost and the apparently respectable cultists at the Sectarian Defense League. He has the gift (or curse) of psychometry: when he touches something, he can divine its history.

This book wobbles between not very black comedy and straight urban fantasy, and doesn't really succeed as either.

I don't, as a rule, pay a great deal of attention to Canadian politics. I was vaguely aware that something unusual is going on there this week. Then Emma pointed me to the Yarn Harlot's explanation of what's happened.

In brief, for the last two years, Stephen Harper's minority government has been playing a high-stakes game, repeatedly forcing the opposition parties to either vote with him or force an election, which they would likely lose.

Last week, as soon as Parliament resumed after October's general election, Harper put forth an "economic strategy", which included removing federal election subsidies to all parties—effectively hobbling the opposition. The opposition were deeply unhappy about that, and also about the lack of response to the worldwide economic crisis.

They told Harper that he had "lost the confidence of the house", and that they were ready to form an alternative government.

The matter went to the Governer-General, who today announced that Parliament would be prorogued (suspended) for 53 days.

Wikipedia has more. Surprisingly, this morning's New York Times had no coverage of the expected meeting with the Governer-General.

Yesterday, I said that it seemed like the economy was one giant Ponzi scheme.

Via Eric, Michael Lewis's The End of Wall Street's Boom

[Whitney’s] message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

…

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds.

…

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

…

“You have to understand this,” he says. “This was the engine of doom.” Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.

A sordid tale of moral bankruptcy. Read it and weep.

Today's paper said that 3,400 out of 4,300 WaMu jobs in Seattle will be cut.

Emma worked at WaMu as a software tester for three years. I'm sure that if she were still there, she'd be one of them. Most of her friends from that time have moved on; just as well.

A few years ago, WaMu seemed too big to fail. Now? Circling the toilet bowl.

Our whole economy seems like it was one giant Ponzi scheme, with everyone selling worthless paper to everyone else. It's hard to tell how much was wilful ignorance, and how much was making a buck while the good times lasted and damn the consequences.

Deregulation clearly allowed matters to spiral far out of control. I don't know that better regulation would necessarily have prevented this, since the regulators invariably play catchup, but regulation with teeth might have dissuaded many of the perpetrators.

Feh.

I look out the window. Drizzling—not too heavy—I'll ride to work. Pack my clothes into the panier bag. Spandex tights, coat, yellow jacket, helmet, gloves: on they go. Bike's in the garage, seems okay, slap on the bag. Pull it out, reset the odometer. 17 minutes today?

Ignite the blinky lights, pull away. Down the side roads, until I'm compelled to take the arterial. Press the crosswalk button, wait for a break in the traffic. Two minutes, three, does this fucking light ever change? Off like a shot, past Jefferson Park. Maybe they'll finish by next summer. Hit the next light at 2:30. A long, gentle uphill for the next 8 minutes. Next left, zig and zag back to 14th. The prettiest block on the whole ride: gardens, a much-tended traffic circle, craftsman bungalows.

Keep going past the apartment blocks. Wait my turn at Beacon Ave, go through. Busier now, buses on 14th here. Past Mira's, past the school, road zigs. Pass the highest point, buses go left, I don't. Road narrows, start descending gently. It's all downhill from here.

Brake hard at PacMed when 14th runs out. Wait to get onto 15th. A break in the traffic. Off again. Hurtling down to the Rizal Bridge. Amazon's overflow parking on either side. If I don't have to stop at the light, I'll hit 30 without breaking a sweat. Fly across the bridge, hope to fuck it's not icy.

Watch my mirror. Can I get into the left lane? Yes, then turn left at Weller. Down the hill, hard right at 10th. I'm in the International District now, unmissable when I take a left at King. Downhill again, slower this time. Too many intersections, oblivious pedestrians, parkers heedlessly opening doors.

Right at Sixth, around the Post Office. Jackson, wait to make the left. Only two blocks, dodge the buses. Fourth and Jackson, nasty, nasty. Make the right, get into the left lane. Two more blocks. Prefontaine's diagonal gets me to Third and Yesler. Half a block to Smith Tower. Eighteen minutes. Slipping. Do better next time.

Up the steps, through the corridor. Into the bike cage. Not too crowded today–the rain's good for something. Wiggle the bike down the ramp. Grunt, hoist bike into the air, impale the wheel on a hook. A bicycle abattoir it is. Climb the stairs to Seven. Read email, cool down, shower soon.

Title: Cryptonomicon

Author: Neal Stephenson

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Avon

Copyright: 1999

ISBN: 0060512806

Pages: 1168

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 22–30 November, 2008

The Baroque Cycle books were a prequel, of sorts, to Cryptonomicon. In World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is an American cryptographer, a peer of Alan Turing, and someone who will be the father of the digital computer; while Bobby Shaftoe is a US Marine who works on black ops. Now, Randy Waterhouse, computer nerd and Lawrence's grandson, is setting up a data haven in the Pacific. Amy Shaftoe, Bobby's granddaughter, and her father, Doug, are marine salvage experts working for Randy, who find a gold-filled Nazi submarine off the Philippines. Somehow, the events of the past and the present will come together, as the narrative bounces back and forth.

Randy, Lawrence, and Bobby all hold our interest as the viewpoint moves between them. Lawrence and his peers break the secret codes of the Germans and the Japanese; Randy's data haven uses cryptography to safeguard data from modern governments. Bobby ultimately just wants to rejoin his girlfriend and son in Manila.

Cryptonomicon is an effective combination of nerdiness and thriller, and a definitive portrayal of geeks in fiction.

There's little that I miss about Irish cooking. One notable exception is Brown Bread aka Brown Soda Bread. I don't know of any bakery that makes it in the States, though I've found it at a couple of Irish pubs. The main difficulty in making it is finding the coarse-ground wholemeal flour. The usual fine-ground stuff has the wrong texture.

I know of only one place in the Seattle area that carries the right flour and that's The Grainery, 13629 1st Ave S, Burien, WA 98168; (206) 244-5015. I bought some flour there today, made a loaf, and brought the loaf and a 10lb bag of flour to an Irish friend's birthday party.

This recipe is adapted from Best of Irish Home Baking by Biddy White Lennon. The quantities shown here make a 6" loaf.

Called a ‘cake’ in many homes and just brown bread in others, this is the national loaf. It is made with varying amounts of wholemeal and plain white flour and (depending on the mood of the cook) small amounts of extra ingredients like wheat germ, wheat bran, oatmeal, or various seeds. Sometimes a small amount of butter, or even an egg, is added and occasionally, a little treacle/molasses. The exact amount of buttermilk needed depends on the flour and the weather–I mean it!

Pre-heat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6. The reaction of bicarbonate of soda [baking soda] and buttermilk is swift and the duration of their interaction short—speed is of the essence.

Mix the flours, salt and soda in a mixing bowl. Add only enough buttermilk to make a soft dough. [The original recipe calls for one scant cup of buttermilk; I always need more than a cup to absorb the flour.] Flour your hands and the work surface and knead lightly (by hand, never with a machine) until the dough is smooth. It is important to understand that this is quite unlike making a yeast-risen dough. Shape into a circle about 4cm/1½ inches deep. Take a sharp, well-floured knife and cut a deep cross in the top. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 40–45 minutes.

To see if it is fully cooked test by tapping the bottom and listening for a hollow sound. Cool on a rack or, if you like a soft crust, wrapped in a linen or cotton tea-cloth. Eat the same day.

[Best eaten with butter or jam. Great when toasted too.]

Variations

A slightly more open texture may be achieved by adding two heaped tablespoons of wheat or oat bran and enough extra liquid to absorb the bran (about 60 ml/2 fl oz/¼ US cup).

Adding grains and seeds

There are probably as many ‘secret’ additions to the basic loaf of soda bread as there are home cooks (and chefs in restaurants who pride themselves on baking bread daily). Pinhead oatmeal and oatflakes are common additions, so too is wheat germ. While sesame seeds and sunflower seeds probably head the list of common additions today, caraway seeds have a long history in Irish baking, particularly in seed cake, sometimes known as Convent Cake probably because it continued to be made in Irish convents long after its popularity waned in ordinary households. Caraway seeds are still, occasionally, added to soda bread as a surprise extra.

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.

Just in case you need some tips for tomorrow's feast.

We're hosting a dinner. My Irish friends, Paul and Maggie, who moved to San Jose at the end of last year, have come up for a few days. It will be their first Thanksgiving together in the States. We'll also be joined by Frank & Lyndol, Raven & Iain, and Peter & Carol.

We're cooking the turkey at high heat, using Barbara Kafka's 500F recipe. The others are bringing everything else. Yum.

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.

By a serendipitous accident poking around on the TiVo a few weeks ago, we found that the Disney channel is broadcasting Shaun the Sheep. It's a series of seven-minute shorts spun off from Wallace and Gromit.

Shaun is the one smart sheep on a smallholding. His inquisitive nature leads to all kinds of mischief. The flock follow along; the sheepdog sometimes helps, sometimes hinders. All the while, the farmer is oblivious. No dialog, just slapstick. Highly recommended.

I learned today that a new 30-minute Wallace and Gromit, A Matter of Loaf and Death, premieres on BBC TV at Christmas. I'm not sure when it'll be shown in the US. We'll be in Dublin for two weeks then, so we'll be sure to watch it.

I hate composing anything longer than a couple of paragraphs in an online HTML editor. Specifically, I hate writing posts for this blog online. I'd much rather write in Vim and upload HTML. But I don't want to compose in raw HTML either.

I use reStructuredText (reST), an unobtrusive plaintext markup language popular in the Python world. reST can generate HTML, LaTeX, native PDF, ODF, and other formats. The picture at right shows a draft of this document in MacVim; reST is, as you can see, quite readable (though I work with a larger font). I use restview to preview the HTML locally and Pygments for syntax highlighting of code. Vim has its own syntax highlighting for reST and I've developed a set of keyboard macros for my own use.

The weak link in this scheme is posting to the blog. Right now, I have a little wrapper that generates HTML, extracts the body, and copies it to the pasteboard (clipboard). I then manually paste that into a raw HTML textarea in the blog's editor. Someday, I have to adapt mtsend or Firedrop2 to make this less painful. Or I could hack dasBlog to support reST in IronPython, or switch over to a blog that supports reST natively. Someday.

For a long time, I used VST (Vim reStructuredText) to generate HTML from reST. As I began using Python more and more, I realized that I was far better off with the real thing, which is well designed and quite fast. The VimL scripting language is not that good and VST pushes it to its limits.

As of the recent Python 2.6 release, all the official Python documentation is in reST format. Sphinx is a documentation build system that wraps a collection of reST documents into a larger navigable entity.

There are many other lightweight markup languages, such as Textile, Markdown, and AsciiDoc. No doubt they have their strengths, but I now have a significant investment in reST and it's well supported by the Python community.