I complained a week ago about my display driver going berserk. I blamed Windows Update, since it happened within hours of a pile of updates being installed. I upgraded to the latest beta NVidia drivers on Monday and it helped for a while, but by Wednesday, it was almost as bad again as it had been last Friday. It was in­fu­ri­at­ing and I was both en­ter­tain­ing and alarming my neighbors with my cursing.

Today was the last day of a very busy sprint for me and at last I had the time to dig into it. I opened up the case and took a look at both video cards—I have …continue.

I walked past this truck at Second and Pike on Monday and did a double-take. Eric was intrigued too when I showed him a photo later, and we went back to in­ves­ti­gate yesterday.

They only opened a few weeks ago. As yet, the menu is limited. The Maximus is a pulled pork sandwich with a hot sauce, while the Minimus has a tangy sauce. They have a vegetarian sandwich, chips made from potatoes and vegetables, and hibiscus and ginger lemonades.

I don’t much care for barbecue as a rule. The Minimus with a sprinkling of Beecher’s cheese was good, but not out­stand­ing. The pork was flavorful and not over­whelmed by the sauce. The sandwich …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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 …continue.

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, …continue.