Joel Johnston is a budding young musician and the son of a Nobel-winning physicist, who gets engaged to Jinna, a fellow orphan, only to learn that she’s the grand­daugh­ter of the richest man in the Solar System. Her grand­fa­ther, The Conrad, wants him to breed more heirs. In a fit of pique at the deception, Joel goes on a bender then hops on a colony ship to a distant star. Even at rel­a­tivis­tic speeds, it’s going to be a one-way trip.

Fifty years ago, Robert Heinlein …continue.

Maine PI Charlie Parker is asked to warn off Merrick, a father looking for answers, from harassing his client. The case leads him to uncover a decades-old project of sexually abusing children who’ve fallen through the cracks.

At­mos­pher­ic and disturbing, as Connolly’s novels tend to be.

I find it useful to have multiple Firefox profiles for developing and testing. A clean profile for testing allows you to replicate most users’ en­vi­ron­ments, who don’t install extensions. Running a de­vel­op­ment profile in a separate profile lets you restart the browser without messing with your default en­vi­ron­ment. You can also run Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 side-by-side in separate profiles.

More at the Cozi Tech Blog.

This book was originally published, to little acclaim, in 1995 before Obama first ran for public office. His primary claim to fame at that point was that he had been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. It was reissued in 2004 after his celebrated keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention placed him on the national stage.

Obama is articulate and thoughtful. This excellent memoir tells of his childhood in Hawai’i and Indonesia, his ex­pe­ri­ences as a community organizer in Chicago, and a formative trip …continue.

The sequel to Florida Roadkill. The hy­per­ac­tive serial killer, Serge A. Storms, is still in pursuit of $5 million, as are a new cast of goons.

The action centers around the eponymous Hammerhead Ranch Motel, which houses a wholly improbable set of sleaze­balls.

Moderately enjoyable.

Time for another Odds & Ends.

Well-known evo­lu­tion­ary biologist PZ Myers (Pharyngula) was expelled from a viewing of a new cre­ation­ist doc­u­men­tary, Expelled, last night. Wait until you read the punchline. There is a God!

Lost, one MacBook Air: Steven Levy explains just how he (thinks he) lost his MacBook Air.

It was St. Patrick’s Day on Monday. Peter sent me the Muppets’ Danny Boy video. Andrew told me that the Irish bishops had moved St. Patrick’s Day. Monday was a holiday in Ireland, as is today (Good Friday) and next Monday (Easter Monday), so many people took Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off this week. Bastards!

Emma and I walked with the Wild Geese Players in the Seattle Parade …continue.

It’s not at all obvious how to use Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition to debug JavaScript in Internet Explorer. So I wrote it up at the Cozi Tech Blog.

It’s been too long since I last posted an Odds & Ends.

Henri is a very amusing short spoof of French ennui.

Back in January, Emma and I were being repeatedly shocked by static elec­tric­i­ty. We would in­ad­ver­tent­ly discharge by kissing or otherwise touching each other, or by touching laptops or faucets. Eventually, I realised that it was due to a com­bi­na­tion of the microfiber upholstery on our new couch and the dry, unhumid air. We solved it by a com­bi­na­tion of rubbing an anti-static dryer sheet (Bounce) on the couch and buying a humidifier. That led to a spate of jokes about the spark being gone.

It’s started coming back again. I think it’s time to …continue.

The JavaScript engines in Firefox 2 (Windows) and IE6 can’t handle the new Daylight Savings Time rules in the U.S. The Date() function returns a value that is off by an hour if the system time is between the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of April.

More at the Cozi Tech Blog.

Update 2008/03/14: Mea culpa. This is not a widespread problem. It is caused by the presence of set TZ=PST8PDT in my C:\AutoExec.bat. Per KB932590, the existence of the TZ en­vi­ron­ment variable will cause the CRT to use the old DST rules. (I can’t remember why I set TZ several years ago. It’s part of the ac­cu­mu­lat­ed mess of files …continue.

Over at Cozi, we’ve started a new technical blog. I just put my first post up, describing a nasty problem we had late last year.

Here’s the summary:

Internet Explorer 6 does not support trans­paren­cy in PNG images. The best-known solution is to use the DirectX Al­phaIm­age­Loader CSS filter. It’s less well known that using Al­phaIm­age­Loader sometimes leads to a deadlock in IE6. There are two workarounds. Either wait until after the image has been downloaded to apply the filter to the image’s style, or use the little-known trans­par­ent PNG8 format instead of the filter.

More here.