Title: Spook Country

Author: William Gibson

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Berkley

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0425221415

Pages: 384

Keywords: fiction

Reading period: 14–21 September, 2009

William Gibson has abandoned cyberspace for the present day. No matter. The same elements of paranoia, adrenalin, and technospeak are present.

His story follows three sets of characters, all of whom ultimately intersect, chasing the same mcguffin.

Enjoyable, if confusing.

Today is National Coming Out Day, a day to promote awareness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. For anyone who doesn't already know: I'm bisexual.

I'm married to Emma. That leads people to tacitly assume that I'm straight. Too often, I do little or nothing to challenge that assumption, either from straight people or gay people.

I came out in grad school, a couple of years after leaving Ireland. It was difficult at first, but ultimately rewarding.

I'm married to a woman, but I could have ended up with a male partner, a partner whom I could not legally marry in Washington state. Emma and I married because anything else is second class. This is the root of my passionate involvement with the Approve 71 campaign. It's also why I've been a leader of BiNet Seattle for more than a decade.

The National Equality March takes place in Washington DC this weekend. Forty years after the Stonewall riots, LGBT people are rallying for equal protection in all matters. This is also the Seattle LGBT Equality Weekend.

There's a march this afternoon, starting from Volunteer Park at 2pm. I'll be there. Will you?

PS Let me refer you to Tim Wilson's Coming Out as Good Citizenship.

I'm breaking radio silence to explain the uncharacteristic drought of blog posts. In my last post, I mentioned that I had created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org, allowing you to overlay Approve71's badge over your Twitter icon.

The next day I went over to Approve71's headquarters and introduced myself to the tech team, Josh, Joe, and Adam. One thing led to another, and I spent that weekend writing my first-ever PHP code, which allowed you to upload a photo to Approve71's website, stamp a banner on it, and then save it so that you could subsequently upload it to Facebook for your profile picture.

It's been a big success, used a couple of thousand times.

Since then, I spent a lot of time working on a second version, which lets you crop the photo (using imgAreaSelect) and choose from a set of overlay banners. Some of the banners are for the NO on 1 campaign in Maine, where they're fighting an attempted repeal of their same-sex marriage law.

The second site went live earlier this week. Try it out: Create a Profile Picture.

Twibbon is a service that allows you to overlay a cause's badge over your Twitter icon.

I created a Twibbon overlay for Approve71.org.

The results look great on Twitter and Twibbon.

Unfortunately, if I save the image and upload it to Facebook as my profile picture, it doesn't look so good. Even if I use the FB UI to pan around in the image, the cropping ruins it.

I just mailed stormideas, the people behind Twibbon, asking if they could do something similar for Facebook profiles.

I attended the Approve Referendum 71 community organization meeting this evening and came away with several good ideas.

Emma and I are going to organize a fundraiser in late September or early October. Stay tuned.

I'm getting Freely Speaking Toastmasters and BiNet Seattle to officially endorse the Approve Referendum 71 campaign.

Large businesses like Microsoft and Boeing endorsed the campaign yesterday. I'm told a number of small businesses have too. I'm going to ask our CEO to endorse the campaign. Robbie was willing to host Patty Murray at Cozi and to appear in her press releases, so why not.

I offered my technical services to the campaign, though I'm willing to do grunt work too.

Title: The Stockholm Syndicate

Author: Colin Forbes

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Publisher: Pan

Copyright: 1981

ISBN: 0330267698

Pages: 321

Keywords: thriller

Reading period: 13 September, 2009

The SPECTRE-like Stockholm Syndicate is ruthlessly spreading terror among the European governments. The shadowy Telescope organization, led by former cop Jules Beaurain, is fighting it.

The plot is preposterous but engaging in a classic Cold War thriller way.

Title: The Thirteen-Gun Salute

Author: Patrick O'Brian

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: W.W. Norton

Copyright: 1989

ISBN: 039330907X

Pages: 368

Keywords: historical fiction

Reading period: 7–13 September, 2009

After the events of The Letter of Marque, Jack Aubrey is reinstated as a post-captain in the Royal Navy. He and Stephen Maturin are sent on a diplomatic mission to the South China Sea. Stephen gets to indulge in both a great deal of natural history and in behind-the-scenes political intrigue during the negotiations. Soon after their departure from Pulo Prabang, the Diane beaches upon a reef and breaks up during a storm, marooning them on a remote island.

The book stands on its own merits, but it also advances the story that builds throughout the series. Ledward and Wray, the English traitors who nearly brought down Jack, get their comeuppance in a ghoulish way. Stephen, weaned of his longstanding dependence on laudanum, is both sharper and less pleasant. There is plenty of sailing, but very few battles. Much time is spent on land, but little of it in England.

Recommended.

Two months after our memorial for Frank Maloney, we took the ferry over to Vashon Island to scatter his ashes. It was a beautiful September day, sunny but not too hot, and a 20-minute ferry ride was most pleasant.

Kim and Holly fed us lunch at their place and we all fell in love with their six rescue kittens. We drove to a secluded beach and each of us scattered a teaspoon of Frank's ashes upon the waters. We sat there for a while and talked and wandered. Then, back to Holly and Kim's for cake and coffee.

I know that Frank would have thoroughly enjoyed the day: the fine weather, the ferry ride, the beach, and the food. He would have reveled in the kittens and shone in the company of his friends, who continue to miss him.

I took a large number of photos. The best, somewhat edited, are up at Flickr: ferry, kittens, and ashes.

I've been running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 RC since June. It's been quite painless on the whole.

One wrinkle that I ran into was with some batchfiles which launch applications in %ProgramFiles% (normally C:\Program Files). Due to the magic WOW64 redirector, 32-bit applications are actually installed into %ProgramFiles(x86)%—normally C:\Program Files (x86)—instead of %ProgramFiles%. This is transparent to the 32-bit applications, which think they're running in %ProgramFiles% (C:\Program Files).

However, the cmd.exe shell is 64-bit (unless you make a special effort to run the 32-bit cmd.exe in SysWOW64), so batchfiles see the 64-bit %ProgramFiles% which contains 64-bit applications.

Hence, a batchfile that launches an installed 32-bit application on Win64 must use %ProgramFiles(x86)%, not %ProgramFiles%.

It sounds trivial to have a batchfile detect which flavor of %ProgramFiles% it should use, but the parentheses in the environment variable name make it tricky to parse. On earlier versions of Win64, the environment variable was called %ProgramFilesx86%. Presumably they added the strange parentheses into the variable name because the directory name always included them.

Here's a tiny batchfile that will launch the 32-bit DiffMerge correctly on both Win64 and Win32 platforms.

@setlocal
@set _pf=%ProgramFiles%
@if not "[%ProgramFiles(x86)%]"=="[]" set _pf=%ProgramFiles(x86)%
@start "" /b "%_pf%\SourceGear\DiffMerge\DiffMerge.exe" %*

I long ago found that the safest way to test environment variables whose values may include spaces, is to surround them with both double quotes and square brackets.

I spent 90 minutes phonebanking for Approve 71 after work today. I called voters who had already been identified as leaning progressive and asked them to vote APPROVE on Referendum 71 in November.

Under the recent Domestic Partnership law (SB 5688 aka the “everything but marriage bill”), registered domestic partners (same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples with at least one partner over age 62), and married couples, are now treated equally under the law in all parts of Washington state.

The Religious Right objected and put together an initiative which scraped together just enough signatures to be on the ballot. They'll be voting to REJECT the bill, which would overturn domestic partnerships in this state.

Civil rights should not be subject to a vote. It's important not to have a repeat of last year's Proposition 8 debacle in California. It's important to me personally and I'm putting time and money into the campaign.

If you want to join the effort, sign up at Approve71.org, and become a fan on Facebook.

Phonebanking will take place regularly in Seattle and other locations. In Seattle, it's happening at the Equal Rights Washington offices at 7th & Columbia, beside the freeway offramp. If you have a laptop with Skype, bring it along.

See you there.

Paying bills always makes me grumpy. More than just the drain on my wallet, it's also the sheer hassle and tedium.

I think it was last year that I finally switched over to using electronic billpay. (I'm not always an early adopter.) The hassle is less and I seldom write checks now.

I'd like to know why electronic payments take days, not milliseconds, to clear. More predatory bank practices, no doubt.

I wrote several checks tonight. For months I had been putting off renewing my membership in various do-gooder organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and GLAAD. Some I wrote checks to, others I used their online forms.

I'm going to be getting a couple of dozen checks in the next few weeks. I'm the treasurer of Freely Speaking Toastmasters and our semi-annual dues are due at World HQ on October 1st. We had to raise our club dues by $5, as we moved our meeting location and now have to pay rent.

Title: Bad Debts

Author: Peter Temple

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Quercus

Copyright: 1996

ISBN: 1847241549

Pages: 319

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 7 September, 2009

Jack Irish is a one-time lawyer who makes a living doing odd jobs—investigations, racehorse handicapping, cabinet making—in Melbourne. A former client, who went to jail years ago while Jack had crawled into a bottle, tries to reach Jack and promptly turns up dead. Jack starts looking and what he finds isn't pretty: corruption all the way up into the state government.

Jack isn't stupid, but he is naïve and out of his depth for much of the book. Temple combines the Australian backdrop, social commentary, a decent plot, and interesting characters to make a good book.

Title: Dracula in London

Editor: P.N. Elrod

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Publisher: Ace

Copyright: 2001

ISBN: 0441012132

Pages: 248

Keywords: horror

Reading period: 2–6 September, 2009

In Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula relocates from Transylvania to London. Asking themselves, what would Dracula have done in London before he was killed by Van Helsing, 18 authors wrote unconnected short stories. Dracula meets the Prince of Wales, he is observed by the servants, he terrorizes Aleister Crowley and Charles Fort and Ellen Terry, he even takes the lead in the Pirates of Penzance.

The stories are uneven. None is outstanding.

I held my annual fundraising barbecue for the AIDS Walk today. Actually, the weather was so wet this morning that we cooked and ate inside.

I am happy to report that thanks to the generosity of my sponsors, I have raised $982 of my original goal of $1000. With three weeks left until the walk, I am predicting success in reaching my goal.

On the First Thursday of every month, there's an Art Walk around Seattle's Pioneer Square. All the art galleries stay open late and thousands of people wander around looking at the art.

It's a shame then that in the four years that I've worked in Pioneer Square, I've only Art Walked a handful of times. Maura and Joseph joined us on Thursday and we spent a pleasant couple of hours talking and wandering around, mostly through the Tashiro-Kaplan building. Muhsin was supposed to come too, but couldn't find parking as the Seahawks played a pre-season game.

There are other First Thursday events: many of the museums are free after 5pm. The Seattle Art Museum, the Science Fiction Museum and the Experience Music Project, and the Museum of Flight all are.

Chuckanut Drive is one of Washington State's best yet least-known scenic drives. Take I-5 north from Seattle for 70 miles. Just past Burlington, exit on to state route 11. The highway heads northwest towards the coast across the fertile floodplain of the Skagit valley. For nine miles, you drive past farms and fields. Then the road rises at the coast, changing character instantly.

Now you're driving along the rocky, forested shoulder of the Chuckanut mountains. One hundred feet below as you drive along the twisty, shady road, you can catch glimpses of the waters of Samish Bay through the trees. If you look closely, you may see the train tracks, practically at water's edge. Look out across the bay and you can see the San Juan islands and, behind them, Vancouver Island.

There are a handful of viewpoints. Stop, get out, look around. There are oyster beds below, though it's hard to tell.

When you get to Larrabee State Park, turn down into it. Walk under the train tracks and go down to the rocky promontories and along the beach. Stop at Cove Road and go down to the boat slip and watch the kayakers.

A few miles further along Chuckanut Drive and you'll reach Fairhaven, a small brick town built in the 1880s. Once a fishing village, it now has retirees and restaurants and stores. Fairhaven has been absorbed into the nearby city of Bellingham, but it retains its own character.

South of Bellingham, I-5 runs through the rocky forest along Lake Samish, on the east side of the Chuckanut mountains. It's the most scenic part of I-5 in all of Washington state.

We made the trip just that this afternoon. The photos are at Flickr.

This afternoon, I invited 200 friends, family, and acquaintances to the Reilly & Bartholomew Family Journal. The Journal is the feature that we've been working on at Cozi for several months. It's a lightweight blog that's really easy to set up and post to, with straightforward privacy controls.

More importantly, though, I invited those people to use Cozi for themselves.

I'm inviting you to read the Family Journal that Emma and I set up at Cozi. It's a way of letting our friends and relatives keep up with us. If you see a story you like, add a smile. We hope you enjoy it!

I'm also inviting you to start using Cozi for yourselves.

Cozi is the Seattle startup where I've worked for the last two years as a developer. Our motto is "Family Life. Simplified." We provide a set of free tools that help busy families reduce the friction in their lives.

We have a shared Calender, color-coded for each member of the family. Keep track of your appointments and the kids' appointments; have an automatic reminder sent to you by email or as a text message; import shared calendars from other sites, including your kids' schools; synchronize the calendar with Microsoft Outlook; print out a month's appointments; and more.

Keep track of your Shopping Lists and To-do Lists. Get the lists sent to your phone as a text or read out aloud to you. Access the shopping lists and calendar from the browser in your mobile phone.

The Journal is an easy place to jot down memories with photos. You can keep those memories private, you can send particular stories to friends, or you can share the journal with all your friends.

See http://www.cozi.com/Why-Use-Cozi.htm to get started.

One favor, please. Even if Cozi's not right for you, please mention us to your friends. We may be right for them.

(Some of these features only work in the U.S. Sorry. We're small, we have to concentrate on our primary market.)

Thanks, /George Reilly

PS. To those of you I haven't been in touch with for a while, get in touch.

Oddly, this is the first such mail that I've sent to more than a small number of people in my two years at Cozi. At first, it was because I didn't think that Cozi was really ready to tout widely. Then I let it slide.

We released a monthly newsletter feature today, which sent out an email of all the August stories from shared journals. This was a good opportunity to tell everyone. The product is polished and genuinely useful.

Not much feedback so far.

Title: Hermit's Peak

Author: Michael McGarrity

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Pocket Books

Copyright: 1999

ISBN: 0671021478

Pages: 351

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 31 August–1 September, 2009

Kevin Kerney, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police, has just inherited a high-country ranch, where he finds a dismembered skeleton.

An old-school police procedural (by a real cop) with believable characters and a not implausible plot. The prose is a little clumsy, but the story pulled me along.

Title: Wolfnight

Author: Nicolas Freeling

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Vintage

Copyright: 1982

ISBN: 0394713818

Pages: 200

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 24–30 August, 2009

Inspector Henri Castang of the Police Judiciare investigates the apparent kidnapping of a politician's mistress and discovers a far-right conspiracy.

Written in Freeling's characteristic idiosyncratic style, this is as much a meditation on corruption and compromise as it is a police procedural.