I gave a poetry reading tonight, of Frank Maloney‘s poems. I’m working through a book of In­ter­pre­tive Reading projects at Freely Speaking Toast­mas­ters. I had to read some poetry for tonight’s project and Frank’s work was an obvious choice. (Had I remembered, I would have recorded the reading and made a podcast.)

Frank was most active as a poet in the 1970s when he published his collection, How to Eat a Slug.

Six poems follow that give a taste of his work. The material in [square brackets] I omitted from the reading.

There are two Dr. Temperance Brennan’s. Both are forensic an­thro­pol­o­gists. One is the heroine of Kathy Reichs’ novels, who, like Reichs herself, is a professor in North Carolina and works with the Montreal police. The other is the star of the TV show, Bones, is brilliant but devoid of social skills, works with the FBI in Washington DC, and has a state-of-the-art lab and a crack team of geeks.

A war has erupted between biker gangs in Montreal. Old bones have been found in the ground, including the skull of a teenaged girl, whose other bones …continue.

I fear going into my home office. It’s a huge mess of clutter, books piled everywhere, boxes of unsorted papers, crap all over my desk. (No, it’s not as bad as the ac­com­pa­ny­ing photo.)

My office overwhelms me. As a result, I don’t go in there, except to drop more stuff off and make it worse. I rarely use the desktop system there.

The living room couch has become my sub-office. I sit there of an evening and surf the web from my laptop. I pull out the bills every couple of weeks and take care of them from the couch. Then I dump them in the office.

I know what the solution is. I’ve known for a …continue.

One app that I really want for my iPhone is iKeePass, an port of the KeePass password safe. I’ve mentioned it before. I’m up to about 400 entries now. It’s completely in­dis­pens­able to me for keeping track of not just passwords, but identities, and which websites I’ve registered on.

Apple is holding up approval of iKeePass, apparently in­def­i­nite­ly. It seems to be some com­bi­na­tion of not wanting to approve strong encryption for export and hangups about open source. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s damned annoying.

KeePassX works on Mac and Linux and means that I can move my password database back and forth to Windows without problem. Only my iPhone is without some form of KeePass.

I spent part of my day fighting with CSS for an email template. CSS support is poor in both desktop and web clients, and much worse than in current browsers.

Gmail, for example, does not support <style> in either the head or the body of HTML email. You have to explicitly set style attributes on individual nodes. You might as well be using <font> tags!

You can’t assume that images will be downloaded, so the mail has to make sense without them. And forget iframes.

Cam­paign­Mon­i­tor seems to have the definitive guide to CSS support.

Seven years ago, “Paul Hardy” was found with his head smashed in. He recovered physically, but not mentally. After another accident, his wits come back and a few memories. Googling for the one name he remembers brings the NSA to his door. He goes on the run, causing the un­rav­el­ling of a coverup.

Efficient, well-plotted thriller in the paranoid vein. The plot is as risible as most such books, but no matter. Enjoy it for a few hours.

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civ­i­liza­tion.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The accountant completed our return last night. Usually we have something of a rebate, so the amount that we owed came as an unwelcome surprise. It’s paid now. Bah!

I pay taxes willing enough, but “like” is too strong. We cannot run a complex society without taxes. There are many functions that the vaunted free market performs poorly if at all: roads, sewers, schools, police, health care, education, defense, emer­gen­cies. The profit motive is at odds with providing good, dis­pas­sion­ate service. Government doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do it well either, especially when it’s run by people who are ide­o­log­i­cal­ly opposed to taxes. Vide Katrina.

A Toast­mas­ters meeting has three parts: prepared speeches, table topics, and eval­u­a­tions of the prepared speeches.

Table Topics offer a chance for those present to wing it on some topic for one or two minutes. The Table Topics Master sets up the topics and the speaker has as most a few minutes to prepare.

Sometimes, when I’m running Table Topics, I present a topic for everyone at the beginning of the section. On a winter’s day, I might ask people to tell us about some favorite food they associate with winter. Or I might ask them to tell us about where they’re going for their summer vacation.

At other times, I spring the topic …continue.

Anathem takes place on Arbre, a world where those of an in­tel­lec­tu­al bent sequester themselves in monas­ter­ies apart from the Sæcular world. When an alien ship is noticed orbiting the planet, avout from concents all over Arbre are drawn together for a Convox to determine how to respond to the threat of the Geometers.

Stephenson’s Anathem is an ambitious project, pulling together physics, meta­physics, world-building, an­thro­pol­o­gy, and an adventure tale. It’s an alien world as he keeps reminding us by the huge vocabulary he’s invented. Said vocabulary alternates between ex­as­per­at­ing and en­ter­tain­ing, but …continue.

I wrote yesterday about NTFS-3G because I was backing my MacBook to an external NTFS drive. I was backing up because I wanted to de-partition my Mac.

When I upgraded my MacBook to a bigger drive, more RAM, and OS X 10.5, I par­ti­tioned the drive. I created two 25GB partitions with the intention of putting Windows and Linux on them with BootCamp. It turns out that BootCamp doesn’t like that. It wants the system drive to have only one partition, which it would shrink. I never bothered to go any further.

The disk has been filling up recently and I wanted the extra space back, to extend my primary HFS+ partition by 50GB. I found …continue.