Title: Objectified

Director: Gary Hustwit

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Copyright: 2009

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design and the manufactured objects that litter our lives. In interviews with some leading designers, Hustwit brings forth such topics as our emotional attachment to those objects; the ephemerality and planned obsolesence of most of this “stuff”; the approaches of different designers; designing the manufacturing process as well as the object; how good design often almost disappears; sustainability, when most objects end up in landfill; interaction and interface design; etc.

The danger with such a broad survey is that you can't do justice to anything. I was left wanting to know more about many of the topics. In the Q&A afterwards, Hustwit mentioned that they shot 80 hours of footage. Most of the designers were interesting and articulate; only a couple came across as pretentious twats.

Update: comparing Dieter Ram's designs for Braun in the Sixties and Jonny Ive's work for Apple today.

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.

Kubota Garden is a little-known gem in the Rainier Beach area of south Seattle. Twenty acres of hills and valleys in a Japanese style.

Emma and I met Lyndol down there this morning and rambled through the garden for two hours. It was a fine, overcast day, with temperatures in the low 60s and occasional drizzle—and a pleasant relief from the record heat of earlier this week. I had visited there before: it's at the far end of the Chief Sealth bicycle trail. Lyn had too, but it was Emma's first visit.

The gate was locked when we arrived at 10:30, though the sign proclaimed that it was open from 6am until sunset. We walked in anyway. It was still locked when we left, but a few others also found their way in.

We climbed up the “Mountainside” to the top of the turned-off waterfall, we crossed all the bridges, we found Mapes Creek. Fujitaro Kubota bought swampland in 1927, but most of it has been drained since.

I resisted the urge to take photos for about half an hour, but a grove of twisted trees compelled me to whip my point-and-shoot off my belt. The best photos can be found at Flickr.

Google finally released the much-anticipated Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I've tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not antialiased on Linux.

As a user, I'm happy to see that there is real competition between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web developer, it's a pain to have so many browsers to test.

We've had record heat in Seattle for the last two days. It hit 91°F today.

If I wanted to live in Arizona, I'd live in Arizona.

I just spent over an hour wrestling with the Address Book in Evite, trying to convince it to import a pile of freeform addresses, to no avail. I had to paste them in one-by-one, clicking Add for each one. Feh.

I succeeded in my bigger goal and that was to send out an Evite for our Bloomsday Reading. It'll give us some idea of how many to expect at the reading.

Title: Planet of Twilight

Author: Barbara Hambly

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Bantam Spectra

Copyright: 1997

ISBN: 0553575171

Pages: 389

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 31 May–2 June, 2009

The Chief of State of the New Republic, Leia Solo, is kidnapped and taken to the remote, barren planet of Nam Chorios, whence the lethal Death Seed plague has been released across the sector. Luke made his own way there, seeking his lost girlfriend, Callista. Han and Chewie, Threepio and Artoo are separately trying to rescue Leia.

Your first reaction on seeing a Star Wars novel might be to sneer, as mine was. But I knew Barbara Hambly to be a competent writer of fantasies, science fiction, and mysteries, and she does good work here in the Star Wars universe. Leia and Luke have their own separate moral struggles with the Force. She fears studying to become a Jedi Knight, knowing the seductive temptations that brought Darth Vader low. Luke is an adept, but every time he uses the Force on Nam Chorios, huge storms run amok, killing innocents.

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)

Title: Dance with Death

Author: Barbara Nadel

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Headline Review

Copyright: 2006

ISBN: 0755321308

Pages: 366

Keywords: mystery, Turkey

Reading period: 29–30 May, 2009

Inspector Çetin İkmen is called to a remote village in Cappadocia when a 20-year-old mummified body is found. The case is tearing the village apart. Back in İstanbul, Inspector Mehmet Süleyman investigates an increasingly violent series of male-on-male rapes.

Nadel clearly knows Turkey well, bringing to life characters from different social classes without patronizing them, showing Turkey in its complexity. The story was well crafted, weaving the two strands together to highlight tension. Pace a pet peeve of mine, the two cases did not suddenly, magically become related by the end of the book. The Agatha Christiesque denouement of İkmen's case was a bit much, though.

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.

Title: Old Man's War

Author: John Scalzi

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 0765348276

Pages: 314

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 28 May, 2009

For his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife's grave and enlists in the Colonial Defense Forces. The CDF remake him and his peers into supersoldiers with decades of experience in enhanced bodies. Their mission is to protect the human colonies and to take new worlds. It's an alien-eat-alien multiverse (sometimes literally) and the habitable planets are much contested.

Scalzi owes a debt to Robert A. Heinlein (acknowledged at the end of the book). The wise old man, the citizen soldier, enduring love, youth regained—some of RAH's favorite topics. Too, it owes not a little to Joe Haldeman's The Forever War: disillusionment, soldiers as pawns.

Recommended.

Title: Good Morning, Irene

Author: Carole Nelson Douglas

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 1990

ISBN: 0812509498

Pages: 374

Keywords: mystery, historical

Reading period: 26–28 May, 2009

An Irene Adler book; earlier than Spider Dance.

Suicidal sailors with ornate tattoos, an odd sealing wax, and lost treasure. All these lead Irene, her husband Godfrey Norton, and Nell Huxleigh to Monte Carlo. Irene, with a little help from Sarah Bernhardt and the Crown Prince's betrothed, takes Monaco by storm. Sherlock Holmes finds part of the trail, but completely misses the bigger case.

Fluff, but entertaining fluff.

Title: The Treatment

Author: Mo Hayder

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Dell

Copyright: 2001

ISBN: 0440236177

Pages: 405

Keywords: crime

Reading period: 24–25 May, 2009

A paedophile chained up an eight-year-old boy's parents, then took the boy and killed him. DI Jack Caffery finds the case particularly stressful: his brother was abducted and never found when they were boys. His girlfriend is falling apart too.

Part thriller, part psychological study, part police procedural. Hayder ratchets up the tension as the internal and external pressures on Caffery grow.

Recommended.

The California Supreme Court handed down their decision about Proposition 8 today: they're letting it stand. No new gay marriages, though the 18,000 same-sex marriages that were enacted last year remain valid.

It's a setback to be sure. The silver lining is that the gay community has been fired up since Proposition 8 passed in November.

There's a small but real danger that Referendum 71 will make it on to the ballot here in Washington state. It would roll back the everything-but-marriage domestic partnership law that passed recently.

Title: Terribly Happy (Frygtelig Lykkelig)

Director: Henrik Ruben Genz

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Copyright: 2008

I saw Terribly Happy at SIFF tonight.

Robert is a Copenhagen cop, demoted to a remote village in the bleak bogs of Jutland. The locals are clannish and do things their own way. Robert quickly finds himself coming between the man-hungry Ingerlise and her abusive husband Jørgen. She complains about Jørgen, but won't swear out a formal report. Robert is unwillingly drawn to her.

Billed as a “blackly comic thriller”, it's more of a psychological drama. Robert's unsmiling face carries the film.