I’ve played many roles at Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters over the last twelve years, but I’ve never before chaired a contest.

Every spring, Toast­mas­ters runs the In­ter­na­tion­al Speech and Evaluation Contests. In the autumn, the Humorous Speech and Table Topics Contests are held. The contests are held in most clubs; each club’s winners advance to the area contests; thence to the division contest; and finally to the district contest.

I’ve par­tic­i­pat­ed in each of the contests in the past, making it to the area contests and oc­ca­sion­al­ly the division. I’m not competing this spring, so I’m going to run our club’s contest instead.

I sent this email to the members tonight:

I am the Contest Chair for our …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

Some time ago, we made an ill-considered decision to use recipe names for image URLs, which simplified image management with our then-rudi­men­ta­ry tools. For example, the recipe named "Twisted Pasta With Browned Butter, Sage, and Walnuts" becomes a URL ending in "Twist­ed%20­Pas­ta%20With­%20Browned%20But­ter%2C%20Sage%2C%20and%20Wal­nuts.jpg".

Life becomes more in­ter­est­ing when you escape the confines of 7-bit ASCII and use Unicode. How should u"Sautéed crème fraîche Provençale" be handled? The only reasonable thing to do is to first convert the Unicode string to UTF-8 and then hex-encode those octets: "Saut%C3%A9ed%20cr%C3%A8me%20fra%C3%AEche%20Proven%C3%A7ale".

That seems reasonable, but it was giving us in­con­sis­tent results when the images were uploaded to an S3 bucket. When …continue.

The President of France must decide whether to commute a death sentence. A senior civil servant, finding both his wife and his daughter in flagrante delicto with an artist, shot them all dead. Inspector Henri Castang, the in­ves­ti­gat­ing officer, is summoned to the Élysée Palace. There is no doubt as to the accused’s guilt. He admits it and seems to welcome the death sentence.

Freeling’s novel examines the French judicial system. We’ve all heard that the Napoleonic Code says that a man is presumed guilty until proven innocent, but in fact, under the …continue.

We saw The Big Short tonight, which does a creditable job of explaining the basics of the 2008 financial collapse. It’s written as a comedy-drama, which makes it far more watchable and en­ter­tain­ing than a more sober doc­u­men­tary. The infodumps are cleverly handled, often breaking the fourth wall with celebrity explainers. The characters let their anger and outrage at Wall Street fraud­u­lence bleed through oc­ca­sion­al­ly, as well they should. I’m appalled that not only did no one go to jail, but that the too-big-to-fail banks are bigger now than they ever were.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

Red Ned Bedwell is an apprentice lawyer in Tudor London. He’s trying to fatten his purse by running the Christmas Revels for his fellow clerks, but he’s entrusted with minding a young innocent and keeping him from harm and temptation. The innocent is not nearly as naïve as his over­bear­ing mother believes and Ned must follow his trail through the stews of London.

The book is good at recreating the daily life of Tudor London in 1529 as the Re­for­ma­tion is developing under Henry VIII. The …continue.

The new streetcar line that runs from Pioneer Square to First Hill and Capitol Hill opened on Saturday. I rode it this evening to get from First & Jackson to Broadway & Pine, a three-mile ride that took a full half-hour in the early evening. The streetcar is clean and pleasant and tem­porar­i­ly free to ride, but it has no dedicated lane. Car drivers are still un­ac­cus­tomed to it and the streetcar driver had to blow his horn several times at cars that were blocking our progress.

The new light rail extension line will open in March, connecting Capitol Hill and Husky Stadium. It’s several months early and more than $100 million …continue.

I came across Spoon Theory today:

The basic idea is that [the chron­i­cal­ly ill] have a limited number of spoons available for the day and each action will cost a given number of them – the more demanding the task, the more spoons would be required. The phrase "running low on spoons" can be a useful way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing the need for rest

—Emily Band

I see this sometime with Emma: her various illnesses and sen­si­tiv­i­ties catch up with her and she has little capacity to get things done for a few days. At other times, such as today, she has quite a reasonable amount of energy or “spoons”.

I enjoy good health, as confirmed at my …continue.

Bob Howard is a com­pu­ta­tion­al de­mo­nolo­gist working for the secretive British agency known as the “Laundry”. Some very nasty people are trying to hasten the end of the world, there’s a mole in the Laundry, and Bob’s superior, the mys­te­ri­ous­ly ageless Angleton, is missing. Bob moves back and forth between vicious office politics and es­cha­to­log­i­cal terrors. The Fuller Memorandum is fast-paced and darkly humorous. Rec­om­mend­ed.

Sequel to The Jennifer Morgue. More at Charlie Stross’s Crib Sheet and the Laundry Files Wiki.

I figured out why I saw the following error every time I ran Nose:

======================================================================
ERROR: Failure: TypeError (type() takes 1 or 3 arguments)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/loader.py", line 523, in makeTest
    return self._makeTest(obj, parent)
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/loader.py", line 582, in _makeTest
    return MethodTestCase(obj)
  File ".../lib/python2.7/site-packages/nose-1.3.7-py2.7.egg/nose/case.py", line 345, in __init__
    self.inst = self.cls()
TypeError: type() takes 1 or 3 arguments

It turns out that one module was importing a class called TestApi which had a class­method called run_in­te­gra­tion_tests. The module itself had no tests; it just declared a class called TestO­b­fus­cat­ed­Mix­in, which used some …continue.

We attended the Sherlock Seattle Mini-Convention at the Broadway Per­for­mance Hall. It was much more lightly attended than previous previous Sherlock Seattle con­ven­tions.

The final event of the evening was a Mystery Science Theater–style treatment of Sherlock Holmes (2010 film) given by some of the con’s organizers. We had seen Young Sherlock Holmes get the MST3K treatment at last year’s con and the show was quite funny. This show was also funny, but I was appalled at just how bad Sherlock Holmes was. (I suppose that’s the point of getting the MST3K treat­men­t—the movie stinks and deserves to be heckled.) It was totally incoherent and anachro­nis­tic and ineptly made.