Candidate Obama talked a great line in gay rights, selling himself as a “fierce advocate”. He'd get rid of the Defense of Marriage Act, Don't Ask Don't Tell, and more.

President Obama has been a big disappointment on gay rights. He hasn't done anything about DADT, he hasn't spoken out about gay marriage, he hasn't made any gay appointments. John Aravosis has a good roundup at Salon.

But now a shitstorm has blown up. On Friday, the Department of Justice filed a brief in defense of DOMA. First of all, the DoJ is not actually required to defend all laws. More importantly, the brief was gratuitously offensive, invoking incest and pedophilia.

People are outraged. A major fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee celebrating the 40th anniversary of Stonewall is falling apart as the attendees are declining to attend.

I don't know what's going on in the White House, but I don't like it.

Today, June 16th, is the actual Bloomsday. For expediency, we in the Wild Geese Players usually perform our reading at the nearest weekend.

The Irish Times writes its usual report of a crowd of posers re-enacting fragments of Ulysses in Dublin. Perhaps the best line:

Back in the city centre, a sign outside Davy Byrne’s advertised a Bloomsday special: Gorgonzola cheese sandwiches and burgundy for €12.90. Someone nearby complained loudly that prices had gone up since 1904.

A Spanish translator of Ulysses remarked:

“You don’t have to be a Joycean to enjoy this day,” he said. “It’s wonderful to see literature taking over the city and there are lots of ordinary people, not just scholars.

“That’s a very Joycean act. Yes, he’s difficult and demanding to read, but look around you, and see how people have responded to him. That’s what happens when you capture the soul of a people.”

Colum McCann had his own take on Bloomsday in the New York Times:

Soon my grandfather was emerging from the novel. The further I went in, the more complex he got. The man whom I had met only once was becoming flesh and blood through the pages of a fiction. After all, he had walked the very same streets of Dublin, on the same day as Leopold Bloom. I began to see my grandfather outside Dlugacz’s butcher shop, his hat cocked sideways, watching the moving “hams” of a young girl. I wondered if he had a penchant for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” I heard him arguing with the Citizen in Barney Kiernan’s pub. I felt him mourn the loss of a child.

…

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

Amen.

Title: Old Boys

Author: Charles McCarry

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Orion Books

Copyright: 2004

ISBN: 0753819813

Pages: 484

Keywords: thriller

Reading period: 11–15 June, 2009

Paul Christopher, septuagenarian and former superspy, was last seen in a remote Chinese province. His ashes are delivered to his cousin Horace, also a retired spy, who is not convinced that the ashes belong to Paul. Then he learns that Paul is on the trail of Ibn Awad, a mad sultan with nukes who covets a first-century manuscript (a Roman spymaster's report on Jesus) that is thought to be in the possession of Paul's 94-year-old mother, who hasn't seen since 1940, when she was abducted by the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. So Horace recruits a handful of creaky-kneed retired spies and goes after Paul.

Anyway.

If you can get over the wild improbability of the plot, it's actually well-written, coherent, and plausible on its own terms.

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.

Our 2009 Bloomsday reading is over! I thought it went very well. We had quite a large audience by our standards—about 30 people, we got a lot of laughs, and most of them stayed until the end.

Of all the spaces that we've performed in, I like the University Bookstore the best. The events area is sunny, airy, and spacious, and easily discovered by customers in the store. The staff were very helpful and easy to work with. I'd prefer not to do another event on the same day as the University of Washington's Commencment, however.

Eric came along with a big lens and took hundreds of photos. Emma took a few as well. The best of them are up at Flickr.

Thank you, everyone.

This morning, the video adapters on my Vista dev box were resetting 2–3 times per minute.

After a pile of Windows Updates landed on my machine at 3am yesterday, it would occasionally freeze solid for a few seconds. Once in a while, all the monitors would go black briefly, then restore. Each time, I would see a status update pop up from the system tray, "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

This was irritating enough that I downloaded the latest NVidia drivers this morning, 185.85_desktop_winvista_32bit_english_whql.exe. That really screwed me. The video adapters started resetting 2–3 times per minute, rendering the machine almost unusable. I have two video adapters, NVidia GeForce 8600 GT and NVidia GeForce 7600 GT.

The eventlog was full of Event ID 4101 - Display Driver Timeout Detection and Recovery.

I reverted to the 178.24 drivers and that helped. When I'm not touching the machine, the adapters only get reset every few minutes instead of several times a minute. When I am using it, something as simple as clicking a window to bring it to the foreground can trigger a reset.

It's very irritating but I can live with it for a little while, unlike the other. I don't want to repave my box: apart from the time loss, I'm not convinced that it would help if I got the same driver config all over again.

I contacted a friend at Microsoft who tried to hook me up with a driver guy, who is unfortunately out of office. I'm hoping that it can be fixed early next week or my temper is going to fray rapidly.

Update: June 19th: See When Video Cards Go Bad.

Title: Shadowplay

Author: Tad Williams

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Daw

Copyright: 2007

ISBN: 0756405440

Pages: 737

Keywords: fantasy

Reading period: 3–10 June, 2009

Sequel to Shadowmarch. Southmarch is under siege by the fairy army and the teenaged regent, Briony, has been deposed by an ambitious noble. Briony is on the run, fleeing for her life. Her twin, Barrick, is lost, mentally and physically, behind the fairy lines. Far to the south, Qinnitan has successfully fled from the autarch, but now the autarch is besieging the city of Hierosol where she is hiding.

The second book in a trilogy often suffers from Middle Book Syndrome: the first book establishes the characters and the plot, the final book resolves everything, but the middle book has to somehow keep things going, and the author's energy often flags. Williams moves the plot along nicely, from one cliffhanger to the next, and we see the main protagonists mature as they are tested.

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.