A carnival of technology

I don't even know what I want out of a computer anymore.

Outside of my job, the things I want a computer to do are about the same things anyone wants a computer to do:

• Surf the information superhighway
• Read and write email
• Store recipes
• Play some wicked tunes

Since about 1998 or so I've used Linux at home, the reason then and still being that I like to tinker. Windows is pretty alright for the things I want to do but often confining, and I've never quite been able to wrap my head around Mac OS. My attempts at using Mac OS, even without the xtreme popup rad-mode dock, have usually ended in confusion over some detail or another, and I still haven't forgiven Apple for Quicktime.

As far as my computer habits today, the difference I'm finding is that while I still like to tinker, I'd rather not have to. I'd like for everything to work right out of the box, but I know that this will never fit my skewed view of the world, so I'd instead like everything to work after the box, some brief configuration and a handful of extra programs. My choice of web browser dates back to the Netscape wars with reasons long since irrelevant, but I now find the Web unusable without Adblock and a browser that makes such extensibility possible. I use Thunderbird mostly because it's slightly less awful than the alternatives and less likely to do something unexpected. My music player, Amarok, is really the only choice that binds me to Linux. Could I find something in Windows to fill the gap? Probably, but it was painful enough finding a good player in Linux that doesn't choke on a collection of my size and understands that some albums have more than one artist. I stick with Linux partly because of its philosophy of customizability–easy access to keyboard shortcuts, “sloppy” focus, finely tunable keymap options that present the full range of human expression, or in my case at least the full range of New Yorker English and the occasional dash or two–but mostly because of the environment it provides for when I program as a hobby instead of as an occupation. Windows provides some very nice tools, some them now even free, for building a Windows application, but it doesn't make it easy to tinker.

What I don't like about Linux is that it's always a step or few behind environments that don't require tinkering. The particulars of hardware support is always the worst. For example, I have a USB hard drive, and in order to save power and wear it will spin down after ten minutes or so of inactivity. It takes about five seconds or so to spin back up, and it used to be that Linux would wait about two of those seconds and then decide something must be wrong: even if you do end up reading from the device at some point, it's probably a bad idea to write to it so let's just turn the whole thing off before you do something dangerous. There was a way around this. I added a file to /etc/udev/rules.d that, when it saw the plugin event from this drive's particular set of identifiers, would write some text to a file somewhere in /sys that would instruct Linux to chill out and maintain if it can't read the device right away. This extra step became unnecessary a few upgrades ago, but still: this was a release version of a popular Linux distribution, and it failed in an annoying way that would never be seen in Windows or Mac OS. My annoyances today seem mostly to stem from the differences in GNOME and KDE, an ancient and boring fight between graphical toolkits that I only care about now because I use one for my music player and the other for everything else. Amarok wants to be able to watch for discs in the CD-ROM drive and iPod plugins, and if it happens to catch on to those things before GNOME, which is fortunately rare, it usually makes a mess. Linux has gotten a lot better over the years, but what's most frustrating is that while it's grown into something that feels much more like a real desktop operating system than it did back in the 90's, it's always fallen a little short of the mark.

The first Linux distribution I used was Redhat 5. I briefly used Slackware before switching to Debian by the time I went off to college, I experimented with Gentoo for a while after that, and I eventually became fed up with distributions in general and joined two other Tech students in creating Peachtree Linux (not affiliated with Sage Software or the Peachtree Accounting suite). After Peachtree's demise I switched to Fedora because everyone else was using it. Fedora, by way of Redhat, has been a long constant in the Linux world, and I no longer cared enough about whatever objections I'd had to it before. Recently I realized that maybe there are other choices out there, and maybe I ought to take a look around and forge my own path. I ended up finding a lot more maybes.

What I want is a Linux distribution that provides a desktop environment where manual configuration of just about anything–network, display, sound cards, USB devices–is considered an exceptional event, preferably a distribution where these exceptions can be handled by simple graphical tools instead of a need to poke through a hundred text files in a hundred different formats. I'd like a distribution that can adequately walk that thin line between cool new features and stability. Additionally, I need to consider whether a distribution can handle the fourth task in that list above. Due to a mess of patent licensing and other legal concerns, distributions that are out to make a buck tend not to provide support for mp3s or several video codecs. So I need a distribution that can either turn a blind eye to this point of law or has a community that does, something like Livna, in order to easily play mp3s.

Debian might fit most of the bill, but I doubt it. Their “stable” release is famous for being hilariously out-of-date, and “testing,” a compromise created about eight years ago between the slow-moving stable and the unfiltered, buggy battle of the unstable distribution, is still a briar patch of surprises and daily changes. Also, while Debian is famous for creating their community-oriented model, opening to their users an unfathomable expanse of software choices, they lack the centralization or drive necessary to make the coherent environment I'm looking for. Gentoo is just a Debian that's made some bad decisions and where an update means spending a week rebuilding the system from scratch. Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian, but built in such a way as to take advantage of the huge pool of community contributions but offer a friendlier environment on top of it. I don't trust Suse or Mandriva (didn't one of them go bankrupt?) to have grown past the mistakes I remember struggling with at Emperor, and I don't think either is in a position to offer anything interesting. And then there's Fedora. I'd like to like Fedora. Fedora's problem is that every release contains some new thing that's kind of cool and some new thing that's horribly broken.

Fedora 9 switched from Redhat's system-config-network, a tool that's brought me joy and pain through the years on its own, to GNOME's network configuration tool, NetworkManager. That all seems well and good, switch from the Redhat-specific things to the the new, generic things, but they left system-config-network running. I don't know why and don't really care–my guess is that NetworkManager doesn't work in all situations and they left the old tool around to pick up the slack,–but the result is that, after whatever exciting races the two tools run at boot time, I get a DHCP lease about 95% of the time; the hostname isn't set at all, even though I set it during the install, unless I add it to some text file somewhere, and I have about a 5% chance of being able to lookup names local to the LAN (like the name of the NAS box I need in order to get to the mp3s I can't play). Fedora 8 brought pulseaudio, which appears to be an attempt to reinvent esound in a way that crashes even more frequently. As a bonus, after installing the compatibility layer that makes sound work on Youtube again, Flash becomes extra unstable and will bring the browser itself more often than not. Perhaps pulseaudio is meant as a madeleine to bring back memories of those halcyon days of Netscape 4. Sound in Linux is complicated. A lot of people made some bad decisions; I think the Fedora maintainers are among them. Fedora 7...I don't know, I'm sure it had something wrong with it. Fedora 6 seemed ok.

But Fedora, or rather Redhat, has done a lot of things that I think are really kind of cool. Rpm, despite its flaws and godawful spec file format, is really the best package manager I've seen. It has an automatic dependency creation and resolution system that puts the hand-crafted three-level ridiculousness of Debian and its ilk to shame, and it was the first to figure out that it isn't feasible to use a flat text file to store the kind of package data needed in any general purpose distribution. One Redhat-specific addition that I find pretty neat is the way it handles debugging symbols. While Redhat/Fedora packages are shipped without debugging symbols, as is the way of such things, it also has the option of installing unstripped programs and libraries in /usr/lib/debug. The Redhat-packaged gdb knows to read these files and can even tell you which debug library packages you're missing for a particular program. It makes tinkering available and easy. I wish the rest of the distribution had that kind of thought put into it.

I've viewed Ubuntu as some kind of a hipster joke for most of its existence. When it came out I didn't want an extra user-friendly desktop, I didn't want something based on Debian, and I certainly didn't want something with ads that looked like American Apparel joins the Peace Corps. With this distro-existential crisis I've been having I decided to cast off my prejudices and install Horny Hedgehog, or whatever the H release is called. There were a few minor things that annoyed me right off the bat, mainly the choice to make the trash can a tiny icon in the taskbar instead of a big one on the desktop, and the hoops I had to go through to prevent anything from happening when I plugged in my mp3 player when all I want in to get to it in Amarok, but overall the Desktop is pretty nice. Missing packages are available at the click of a button in situations where things go wrong (mp3 codecs, flash plugin), and I actually found myself getting annoyed when I had to change things outside of the available tools (like the music player plugin thing), getting annoyed at times where before I wouldn't have thought it unusual to open a text file in one window and a dense manual in another and fix it by hand. It has a kind of cool feature where if you type an unavailable command in a terminal, it'll tell you what package to install and what command you need to run to install it. And it's removed the idea of a root user, instead making administrator functions available by prompting for the user password anytime an escalation in privilege is needed (or just silently doing it for people who know what to add to which file), something I think desktop-oriented systems should have done long ago.

As time wore on, it became increasingly obvious that Ubuntu's main contribution is to offer a theme that turns everything brown. I guess that theme was really the first thing that irked me. I get it, founder dude's from Africa, some of Africa is the color of dirt; please make everything not ugly again. H is a “long-term support” release, which apparently means that it's still full of buggy software, but those bugs will be updated over the course of thirty-six instead of eighteen months. The bug that pissed me off the most was one involving the keyboard. I like to remap Caps Lock to act as an extra Ctrl key, because I hit Ctrl a lot, I don't want carpal tunnel and I think Caps Lock is useless. This Ctrl key position is seen a lot on old Unix workstations, and it's easy to set this layout in the GNOME keyboard preferences. The problem in Ubuntu is that once I did this, while the Caps Lock was Ctrling like it should, it was also toggling the Caps Lock LED. The bug was fixed in the new short-term support release, but I don't know if the change ever made it back to H; I just figured out what to put in which text file and moved on. One problem I haven't yet figured out is the little gray rectangle the sometimes appears in the top left corner of the screen. It looks like the corner of a window that's been accidentally moved off-screen, and it's becomes most visbile and distracting when I try to watch a video full-screen and the little rectangle stays in the foreground. It goes away when I close Firefox, and it's something I never saw in Fedora. On the plus side for Firefox, flash isn't so crashy anymore despite it still running through pulseaudio, but it looks like that's because Adobe released Flash 10 while I was making this switch, so it's probably fixed in Fedora by now, too.

So in all Ubuntu works mostly like I'd expect it to, but it's especially noticeable when it doesn't, and from browsing the forums and bug reports it looks like users and developers alike lack either the knowledge or motivation to do anything beyond making every program match their shit-ugly brown coffee stain theme. Sigh. At least some of the folks at FedoraHat know what they're doing and maybe even get paid for it. I just don't know. Fedora 10 is coming out in a couple of weeks. Maybe that one will be ok.

I don't want to get too opiniony here today, because everyone's had about enough of that. Barack Obama announced his candidacy on February 10th, 2007, John McCain on the 25th of the following April. Nearly two years. Two years this election has been in headlines, filled the airwaves, been a backdrop during financial collapse, ongoing wars in the Middle East and new unrest in Central Asia, earthquakes and floods and hurricanes. Two years. This is it. And whatever happens tonight, we're watching history.

Georgia has been early-voting since late September, but that whole idea never appealed to me. It feels like cheating. The law is clear: after the Sabbath following the bringing in of the harvest, it's time to hitch up the wagon and make a trip into a town to cast your vote on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November; thus it is our solemn duty as citizens of this great country to suffer through all of the campaigns' final surprises, thrusts and dying gasps until it comes time to appoint our Electors on Election Day. Plus there were like two million people trying to early vote. It was nuts; wait times averaged about three hours. If I'm going to have to wait three hours I'm doing it the patriotic way.

Today began as most days do on mornings after I've set my alarm for an earlier time: I woke up around 8 with the realization that I didn't actually turn the alarms on and rushed through a panicked blur of clothes and toothpaste and hot water and orange juice. The annoyingly re-dated Daylight Saving Time switch helped out today, though, since 7 still feels like 8, and, while I couldn't get in line before the polls opened, I at least wasn't starting terribly behind. Grab a book, get a coffee from the Citgo and off I go to exercise my rights as an American citizen.

There have been a handful of elections since I moved to Sandy Springs–the 2006 midterm elections, the presidential primaries this year, the statewide primaries and a handful of local things–and it seems like my polling location changes every single time, swapping between the High Point Elementary and Ridgeview Middle schools. I really don't know why, maybe something to do with expected turnout and how fine-grained a particular precinct needs to be for a particular set of ballot questions. It's confusing. Poll workers periodically walked up and down the lines today reminding us that the state of Georgia really can require photo ID to vote this time around–the law got a shout-out in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and everything–and trying to explain who should be in this line and who should be a in a different line at the middle school down the road. Your voter information card is a lie, the web site might not be accurate; through all the last-minute registrations and address changes and other complications, it all came down to which side of a two-lane residential road you live on, and just pray that the computer at the front of the line agrees. I only saw one person cut to the front of the line having earned his credit waiting for a couple of hours in the other one, so I guess you could say it went smoothly for the time I was there.

For myself, voting didn't take too terribly long. I found an illegal parking spot a couple of blocks from school at about 7:30, and I was out of there by 9. Everyone was prepared for a long wait–I had my book and tiny radio tuned to NPR, some people had chairs, a lady in front of me was reading Twilight, but we didn't need our little comforts for long.

One thing I noticed while waiting was that the poll workers seemed younger than usual. There were the usual octogenarians tapping away at the awkward registration roll computers, but there were also a bunch of people there in their twenties or younger. Georgia's current system in this world of tomorrow is to have voters fill out a card with name and address by hand, take that to someone checking IDs, take the freshly initialed card through another series of lines to someone who looks up the registration and formats a smart card, and then take the card to a touch-screen Premier Election Solutions (né Diebold) voting machine. The ballot was eleven screens long–president, senator, John Lewis running unopposed again, county surveyor (“As there are very few duties for the county surveyor, i will serve to best of my abilities when required to perform my duties.”), a whole mess of mostly unopposed, incumbent judges, a handful of state amendments and some homestead exemption referendums. I tapped away for a bit, hit the “Cast Vote” button and traded the ejected card for a peach sticker. And that was it. I voted.

And now, in the immortal words of the fourteenth president of this great nation, “There's nothing left but to get drunk.” Barring some kind of 2000-style fiasco, by tomorrow, or maybe even a little later tonight, we'll have elected the forty-fourth leader of this diverse and fertile land so blessed by Providence. Let's hope he's a good one.

On December 31, 2006 February 17th, 2009, all full power analog television broadcast licenses in the United States will expire per Title III of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 (47 USC 309), ending analog television broadcast and completing the transition to digital TV. The goal of this change is to reclaim the VHF TV spectrum, and because digital TV is way more rad than that analog NTSC junk. Cable and satellite TV subscribers are unaffected by this change and are most likely already receiving digital signals anyhow.

I don't have cable or satellite. Apart from the presidential debates I've been masochistally consuming this year, about the only TV I watch is that show with the angry jerk doctor, so I haven't felt any need to pay for it. And since the median year of the movies I have on DVD is around 1980 or so, I haven't found any pressing need to buy a new television set. I am one of the dwindling group of people affected by the switch, one of the people using rabbit ears and an analog television, so I need to buy a converter box if I want to watch TV after February. And that's what I did.

Part of that most recent act to mandate the digital switch was a program to provide $40 coupons, up to two per household, toward the purchase of a digital converter box (www.dtv2009.gov). Mine came in the mail on Friday, so I walked over to that new Target sitting atop the apartment complex down the street that was demolished in an effort to rejuvinate The Prado, and I purchased a converter. Target had three brands ranging in price from $50 to $60, and I couldn't see any difference among them other than that one of the $60 models had a plug for a smart antenna, which I don't have. Cheapest one available, then.

The coupon I had was issued by the United States Department of Commerce, and it came as a red magstripe card, looking much like the logo for the dtv2009 site. Of course, no one at Target knew what to do with it. This card didn't go through the Visa or Diner's Club or whatever network like other discount cards might, and it didn't have a barcode to scan like a manufacturer's coupon. It took three people poking buttons and scanning things to figure it out, but I was able to buy a converter box for $10 + tax so that I can join the future and contribute my fair share to the deficit.

So now I just have to figure out how to use the thing. I have trouble picking up analog channels. With the exception of some religious stations and Telemundo, most transmitters in the area are south of me, and my apartment faces north. I can pick up Fox for some reason, but that's about it, and even that one station is a struggle. I have fiddle with the dipoles and get out some Reynolds Wrap and try to find that one tiny spot on the gain knob like I'm adjusting the hot water in the shower. But through all of this I have instant feedback: if I did something right, the picture gets better, and if not the picture gets worse. Things are a bit different with the digital converter box. Since the picture now depends on the digital tuner synchronizing to a digital stream and not losing too many packets, there isn't much space between a perfect picture and a blank screen. I can hit a button on the converter remote to get a signal strength bar, and I can sort of use that to adjust the antenna position and gain. It's a lot more difficult to tell when I have it right.

So now instead of fiddling with the antenna position and maybe living with a some multipath ghosts, I have to fiddle with the antenna position even more and maybe live with some ugly-looking packet loss. Hooray, the future.

“The network is the computer,” John Gage, Sun Microsystems, 1984

I have trouble throwing things away. I'm not saying that I'm a packrat, though that might be true, but it isn't the root of the problem. I'm just lazy. I don't want to be troubled by the idea that I should clean up after myself, and, when faced with the reality of living in a junk-filled sty, I find patches instead of solutions. My cache of useless junk finds its way into closets, tucked away into the crannies of bookshelves, hidden under tables or even just left sitting on top of the table if I don't need the space right away. The closets are the worst, since they're full of the boxes of crap I decided to take with me when I moved–some of it from the last move but most of it from the one before, things that I will never use and now never have to think about. I'll admit that I've gotten some use out of the old computer parts. It's nice to have a spare DSL modem or power supply lying around, but when's the next time I'll need a dual Pentium Pro motherboard (hint: never)? I am a hopeless slob and I should be ashamed of myself.

My computing habits are very similar to my real-life habits, perhaps most manifest in the way that I write code. I work from the command-line rather than using one of those fancy IDE things, and when I want to do something outside of the editor–grep for a function call, build the project or something else I'm more comfortable doing in a real shell–I'll usually just hit CTRL-z to background the editor and move on to whatever else. I don't always go back to that editor right away, however, or sometimes ever again. I'll often find myself with a dozen terminal windows open, four of five editors running in each, each of those with who knows how many files opened in split screens. I am sloppy and forgetful and I should be ashamed of myself.

I treat files on the computer in much the same way: just dump everything wherever it's convenient at the moment and move on. I decided to take stock of my home directory (I'm a dirty hippie Linux user, so this is basically like the desktop in the real world) recently, and I found files there that I hadn't touched since 2002. Some of them have probably been there longer, but it appears that June 20th, 2002 was the last time I lost a hard drive and screwed up the timestamps when restoring from backup. There was a .maildir from back when I thought that using qmail was an ok idea instead of a stupidly insane idea, or even ran a mail server at home at all; config files for Netscape 4; the Neiman Marcus cookie recipe... The list goes on. Age alone doesn't account for this, since I make a mess pretty quickly wherever I go. Taking a look at my Windows desktop at work, where I've been now been for about six months, I found the following:

• 23 installers for various programs
• 2 unpackaged programs just chillin'
• 2 C# dlls used by a program I deleted a while back
• 1 AVSynth script
• 4 C source files
• 7 zipped program packages (4 unpacked in same directory)
• 1 firmware upgrade zip for a TV set-top box
• 1 saved output from mplayer
• 1 source tarball for one of the zip file programs (also unpacked)
• 4 movies in various formats
• 1 .reg file to undo the mess that winzip makes and doesn't clean up
• 1 unreadable junk
• 1 empty directory
• 1 shortcut to a program
• 1 text file with some irrelevant data
• 1 thunderbird plugin installer
• 5 network captures
• 1 directory with a single .exe whose purpose I've forgotten
• 1 directory with some video files
• 3 directories with standards documents
• 3 more unpacked programs (2 with source)
• 2 VC projects that don't actually do anything

In all it was nine and a half gigamabytes. In order to try to rationalize such waste, that video directory was where I was messing around with some uncompressed 1080p videos, so that accounts for most of the space. Without those I had only 1.3GB of junk. After deleting everything I would never need again or that was already stored somewhere else I was left with 32MB.

My main problem is that I never clean anything up and I'm only barely aware of it. Looking for ways to help me fix this mess, I came across an old idea that just might do some good: store my home directory in a version control system. Besides providing me a history of file changes and possibly easy backups, it might force me to pay a little more attention to the files I fling around so freely.

David Cantrell took a look at storing home in CVS a while back, and version control systems have come a litte way since then. Most of the list of caveats–symlinks, directory management and funky filenames–is no longer a cause for alarm. Permissions might still be an issue, since version control is still designed with tracking changes to software in mind rather than keeping ssh happy about the read-bits on your keys, but workarounds similar to those used with CVS can work elsewhere.

But then I started to overthink it, as this sort of problem would encourage. Why not use a distributed version control system? Something like mercurial would be perfect. It would eliminate the need for a central server, allowing me to just move the same directory around everywhere while still making backups easy when I feel like it, and it has some nice features, like the addremove command to set the saved state to whatever the current working state is, and that could be easily scripted in a nightly job to remove my active participation from the process, giving me none of the benefits of this crazy idea except for version history, the one I don't really care about. Whoops.

So I started thinking a little bit more. One of those pie-in-the-sky computing ideas that I actually like is the delocalization of assets. I've more often done the opposite, keeping everything, including this website, local, but I've been slowly moving in the other direction. Email was easiest, finally catching me up to 1997 or so. From anywhere I can point a mail client or a web browser to Site5 and have everything in the same state it is at home. Where's it actually stored? Who cares? It's somebody else's problem now. I can't make everything somebody else's problem, at least not without a lot more trust than I currently have in anyone who could do such a thing, but that NAS device I bought a while back could be a surrogate. Its obvious use is as storage for the things I might have shared with the world in bygone days, but I've started using it for other large, semi-organized things that before I've kept in my home directory: photos, various documents, things that I'd like to keep handy though I don't use them every day. Why do I even need a home directory at all?

My solution was just that, get rid of my home directory. I backed it up in case I ended up needing anything out of it and then started over. The configuration files are the most obvious absence, but it turned out to be pretty minor. There are a few files that I've carried around for about ever that I quickly carried over–I'd be lost, or at least very annoyed, without my .vimrc, for example–but most everything else I can just configure as I go. Somewhere back in the Peachtree days I joined the rest of the world and started using GNOME, a software suite that gives me some semblance of a real graphical computing environment, and it, like Windows, uses a central configuration database that doesn't lend itself well to transferring back and forth, but it only took me about a day of fixing minor annoyances before I had everything matching my particular eccentricities again. Maybe this is the way to go, figure out the small handful of things I really need on any particular computer, keep the rest on the network and let everything else be blasted away on a whim.

I haven't separated computing from locale, but I've at least created a more diverse location. My computer is a workstation and a file server, but mail and web files are somewhere else, and some files are on a USB drive or a handful of DVDs or a little keychain stick. The network isn't all of the computer, but maybe I've freed enough computing from the computer that I can take it wherever it needs to go.

I kept some strange habits from my first car. It was a 1980 Tercel, a couple years older than I am and the perfect car to teach a teenager how to drive. It was a tiny hatchback, built like a tank because they figured solid steel was better than your pansy foam and crumple zones back in those days, a five speed, shook like it was going to fall apart if you got going to fast on the highway, no air conditioning, a broken fuel gauge and it had those manual crank windows that we now find so quaint. The lack of air conditioning presented a challenge in those hot Alabama summers, along with, at times, the hot Alabama springs and falls, but I got by. I learned not to mind the heat too much so long as there was some air moving past me, and even now that I have a fancy car with fancy A/C, I'll more often open up the windows—now much less of a workout, and less of a moving violation when I reach for the passenger side—than sacrifice that bit of power to modern technology. As for the gas gauge, the trip odometer took over that duty. Given a tank size and a rough estimate of the car's mileage, who needs fancy gauges and lights and all that nonsense? I've maintained that habit in my current car. The gas gauge works, but it's not very useful. Its seems to hang around the full mark for a while, drops into the middle where it makes a calculated, precise movement through the middle quarters of the tank, and then it drops down to E and wiggles around for a while not telling me much of anything. The light comes on at somewhere around the three or four gallon mark, and beyond that I have no way to know how much gas I have left other than by looking at how far I've driven.

Gas has been a little weird here lately. The Colonial Pipeline passes through the general area of Atlanta, so a good share of our fuel is pumped up from refineries in Houston, which is all well and good except when there's a hurricane in the gulf. The last time things were this bad was in 2005 with Rita, which, besides really messing up the Texas coast and an already-devastated Louisiana, screwed up the pipeline that feeds Georgia, causing a run on the gas stations and prompting Sonny Perdue, always the champion of education, to call a couple of snow days early in order to shut down the school buses. Gustav and Ike this year caused a whole bunch of damage, and I feel bad for all of those affected, but what do the hurricanes mean for me this year?

That nasty, smoke belching refinery I passed on the great In-n-Out trip of 2003, along with its neighbors, had to shut down for the storms, and that's made gas a little scarce around here. The lack of supply drove prices back up past $4, so at first I thought I'd get by buying just a little at a time, purchasing partial tanks in the hopes that prices would soon drop, and not resetting my odometer, which turned out to be a mistake. Whether through a run on the gas stations by paniced people who remember what happened a couple of years ago or just stations legitimately unable to keep up with normal demand, a bunch of gas stations ran out of gas in the past few days. And so did I. After driving around with the fuel light on and a mystery displayed on the panel, I figured it was about time to refuel, and I couldn't. Everywhere I turned, numbers were removed from station signs and yellow bags covered the pump handles. The stations stayed open, hoping to keep selling doughnuts and beer, and frustrated drivers kept them busy. I ended up going to work today on a mystery tank, trying to remember all the way just how running out of gas was supposed to be bad for fuel injectors and wishing for that 1980 beater. I was able to finally refuel; someone at the office found a station nearyby that still had gas. It had sloppily-written signs taped up everywhere warning of the lack of higher octane fuels, but my low-powered chump engine doesn't need any of that junk. After waiting in line for a while I pumped 12 gallons back into my confused 13 gallon tank. I guess I might have had enough to make it home after all.

Things were simpler back in the good old days. To play music I just loaded up XMMS, added a couple months worth of mp3s, set it to shuffle and let it go, playing the same dozen songs in a random order. The world has since moved on, and I no longer care to jump through the hoops required to run something like XMMS in this land of tomorrow. iTunes-style media players are now the norm, so the time came to find a new piece of software for my music to call home.

Of music players I've tried a few: I started of course with the one that came with GNOME, Rhythmbox (crashy and awful), and moved on from there to Banshee (doesn't support the tags I need), Quod Libet (too slow with more than a couple thousand songs), Songbird (why the hell is it a web browser?), MPD (why do I need to configure a server?), XMMS with the old gtk libraries (yep, still sucks) and Exaile (tags again), each time pointing the new player at my music library and finding something to kill some time while the import ran, like baking a loaf of bread or learning to speak Mandarin (I now know how to count to ten and tell someone they're drunk). I eventually settled on Amarok, a media player for KDE that Fedhat can run in GNOME without too much trouble, a player that runs well with a collection of 20,000+ files after I replaced the default backend with a mysql database (sigh), that tries to look a lot like iTunes, that doesn't allow the full freedom of tags found in something like Quod Libet but generally gets it close enough, or at least close enough that I can stick all those techno mixes under “Various Artists” and leave it at that, a player that does most things pretty alright and is just all around fairly easy on the eyes and fairly easy to use. Finally having a music player that makes metadata worthwhile, I took the time to tag all of my music (Quod Libet actually did come in handy there; the Ex Falso tagger it comes with was very nice for automating most of the tedium), and, since one Gordian knot is never enough, I went ahead and implemented the idea that's been knocking around in my head ever since I heard it from Olin, my compilers prof: space is cheap, so just rip all of your CDs (above) to FLAC and never worry again about the codec of the week. So now I have a terabyte-and-a-half RAID a quarter of the way filled with a bunch of music sorted, tagged, filed, sealed and signed in triplicate, so what now?

I've had a few words, many of them four letters, to say about Web 2.0 in the past. The core tenet of this grand new paradigm is that content is no longer the bailiwick of that oppressive Old World aristocracy, the experts of their fields or the people that can write pretty good; content is generated by the people bringing us all into a bold new network where everyone is connected and no one knows a thing. Despite, however, my bitter words for this affront to literature and human knowledge, there is something about Web 2.0 that I find compelling: tags. A tag is simply a word associated with a thing, like that list of nonsense you see displayed next to Flickr photos or Youtube videos or Amazon reviews. The first inclination is to use such a system as a sort of generic filing system, but it's no good for that. Tags are at their most powerful and most Web 2.0ish when anyone can add one, and that makes them useless for filing: people are idiots, and you're going to end up with a lot of imperfect information. And that's what makes them work. del.icio.us demonstrates this well; I don't use the site, but I like the idea. If you give everyone the power to tag anything with any label, you'll end up with a lot of junk, but people tend to have similar ideas for similar things, and eventually patterns will emerge. Ordo ab chao, and that's really something neat even if I still think that user-driven content is mostly a load of crap.

One of the things that amarok can do pretty well is interact with last.fm, a kind of Web 2.0 music service. The idea is that a bunch of people submit the music that they're listening to, and based on that and the music you listen to the site can make some guesses on what else you might care to hear. I imagine that the actual algorithm has more to do with advertising dollars than anything, but all the information is there; someone who follows up an album of Norwegian black metal with some show tunes is an outlier, but a hundred people who do that is a pattern.

So I've created a last.fm profile, and now we come to my problems with it. One of its functions is to show the world all the crap you've been listening to for the past few days, and that's been something that I need to get out of my head. I used to run a homemade app to do much the same thing back when I lived with Moshe and got tired of him asking what I was listening to, so I'm familiar with the experience of the world knowing I just put together a playlist of eurodance and 90's skate punk, but I still fear that knowing someone can see it might interfere with my choices. Everybody's taste in music sucks, and I'm certainly no exception. I need to just forget that the world is watching and let the music play, and I hope I can do that.

Amarok has a couple of ways it can take advantage of last.fm's information: it can play the last.fm generated playlist, sending back all the information on songs skipped or played, or it can generate a playlist of its own from your local collection based on artists related to the ones you're listening to. I've found a problem with both in terms of diversity. Basing recommendations on a particular song and more recommendations on those recommendations tends to get it stuck in a genre rut. The local mode is especially bad at this: I made a playlist with a handful of songs for which Amarok didn't have anything in particular to suggest, and then all of a sudden it hit something it could work with and decided that it's new wave night. The last.fm stream will hopefully be better able to handle local anomalies once I've fed it more data. Maybe I'll get something out user-driven content yet.

It makes your kids fat. It gives you diabetes. It's a symptom of broken farm policy. It's a symptom of broken trade policy. It just doesn't taste the same.

High fructose corn syrup is a solution of usually 55% fructose and 45% glucose produced from corn starch and frequently used as a sweetener in the United States and Canada. It's difficult to substantiate some of the claims made against HFCS, but it's hard not to at least feel a little uneasy about the stuff. Well, this America, so vote with your dollars; if you don't care for HFCS, look for alternatives. You might need to learn a little Spanish before you buy your next Coke, but for the most part there are readily available alternatives. Tonight, let's take a look at one of the areas oft neglected: things to mix with booze.

While worries about antioxidants and the marketing of companies like POM have created some abominably named cocktails like the pomtini or the pomarita, using pomegranate in drinks is not a new idea. The tequila sunrise, the Roy Rogers (and its sister drink, the Shirley Temple), some variations of the Bacardi cocktail are just a few drinks made with grenadine syrup, named from grenade, the French word for pomegranate. Grenadine today, however, is usually thought of as being cherry flavored, though a cherry in the same sense as cherry Kool-Aid, which is to say that it's red and doesn't taste much like any fruit at all. Let's take a look at the label for Rose's, the most popular brand of grenadine syrup:

INGREDIENTS: HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, WATER, CITRIC ACID, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, SODIUM CITRATE, SODIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVATIVE), RED 40, BLUE 1

Wow, gross. So how hard is it to make your own? Of course, you'll first need some pomegranate juice. According to legend that I just made up, the pomegranate was given by Ahura Mazda to the Persians as a test. Those who bit in faced a mouthful of bitter pulp. Those who began to pick apart the seeds but grew weary and abandoned the fruit were struck down in a shower of free radicals. Only the patient man, he who carefully picked each seed away from the labyrinthine fruit, could understand the secrets of the universe. Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore. There are machines that can do that for you, just go to the store and buy a bottle of juice. Pomegranate faces a problem similar to cranberry in that it's not really drinkable on its own, so most of the juices you'll encounter have been flavored with other fruits. Pure pomegranate is out there for the persistent, and that might not even actually matter; depending on how you want the syrup to taste, POM or something similar might work just fine.

I found one website that happens to advocate POM and has a summary of a couple basic processes. You can either just mix some cold juice with some sugar and shake it like a Polaroid picture, or you can reduce the juice and mix that with the sugar. The problem I had making the reduction was that scalded pomegranate really doesn't taste very good. Maybe I got it too hot, but it was very sour and a little bitter by the time I was done. I might take another shot at it, maybe with POM. As for the cold process, the problem I found there was that it doesn't get very syrupy. I know that I won't get anything near the molasses thick Rose's, but I'd like something with a bit of body. One of the comments to that article suggests using simple syrup instead of sugar, and while that seems a good path to take, I found that adding more and more syrup to try to make a thicker grenadine made something that tasted less like pomegranate and more like just sugar syrup.

The method I settled on was to use the cold process in the article—equal parts pomegranate juice and sugar—with the addition of a dash of simple syrup. I think I'll try experimenting a little more with this; maybe I'll get out the rest of the acacia powder and see what happens. In the meantime the slightly syrupy pomegranate juice serves its purpose: it's red, it's sweet, and it has more flavor than colored corn syrup.

Next up: tonic water! All I need to do is find some quinine and figure out the right blend of the eleven herbs and spices. Sounds easy enough.

One of the first things I remember doing after I started at Telchemy was paying my taxes, which, that week actually starting the Monday before, means it took me three months to the day to get completely fed up with driving. Today I decided to triple my commute time and took the bus to work.

I think I may be able to cut that time down a bit, but it's going to take some experimentation. This morning I took the train to Doraville where I hopped on to the GCT route 10, which takes a slow, meandering path up through Norcross to the Gwinnett transit hub, a dingy circle of concrete and traffic cones behind the movie at theater at Gwinnett Place Mall. Having missed the next bus there by about ten minutes or so, I then waited another twenty for the number 40 which heads up to Discover Mills and from there on to Lawrenceville. The 40 was a bit problematic in that I'm not sure exactly where it goes or stops through Discover Mills. There's a park and ride lot near where I'd like to start biking on Sugarloaf, but it appears to only be accessible to southbound buses, so once the bus started circling around the far side of the mall I just bailed out. Maybe it circles back; I don't know. At any rate, they're both local buses and both seriously slow. There's an express bus that travels from Arts Center, a seemingly distant start but really only station south of where I transfer for the northeast line. It's probably faster, though it's on a less forgiving schedule and costs an extra $1.25. Maybe I'll give it a shot some time.

The transfer process between MARTA and GCT is pretty goofy. Though I did see one bus with some sort of a disabled Breeze reader on it, but this bus was noticeably different in other respects—high ceilings, luggage racks, reclinable Greyhound-style seats—so I suspect it was meant for GRTA routes and perhaps pressed into local service after the distressingly early Xpress cutoff time had passed. GCT does not do Breeze. To transfer to GCT from the MARTA station, though no physical proof of fare is possible in this transferless tomorrow, they still want something, so the driver asks to see your Breeze card. Perhaps this made sense a couple of years ago, back when you could only buy the paper ticket and couldn't reload it, but now that the driver can't take away whatever else might have been loaded on there they simply ask for proof that you were at some point in your life a paying MARTA customer, or at least you went through the trouble to mug one. On the way back they use those old bus-to-rail transfer cards that used to litter the floors of the station back before we were supposed to be able to do away with them.

With the exception of that one I rode on the way home, the buses were basically MARTA buses—same hard plastic seats, same layout, same stuttering sigh when they brake. However, they seemed much more austere than MARTA buses: the comically huge fire extinguisher is replaced by one you might find in a home, equally ineffective against a CNG engine catching fire, and, more strikingly, there were no ads, no TVs incessantly blaring, no placard on the bike rack offering me low low financing on a used car. I think this is just because GCT hasn't found any bail bondsmen or loan consolidation companies willing to spend money on a second tier bus system. A handful of the bus shelters had their ad space filled with big “YOUR AD HERE” banners, but never was there a taker.

In conclusion GCT isn't so bad, but if the crowds making the same transfers I did were any indication, GCT really needs to expand. Maybe Gwinnett will wise up and let MARTA in one of these days.

Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night and all that. Let's see what came in the mail:

• Menu for a new Japanese buffet that was actually mailed for some reason instead of just stuck in my door
• Information on a ridiculous proposal to split Buckhead off into a separate city
• Economic stimulus check for $600
• Another Buckhead mail sent to someone that doesn't live here anymore
• Bill from Rural Metro Ambulance for $613.61

Huh. I guess I forgot one. Well, thanks, dysfunctional government. I guess.

Havana Club, in this case. Well, Bacardi, anyway.

So my parents are coming to visit tomorrow. I don't know, maybe it's a holiday or something. I figure what better way to prepare than to make sure I wake up hungover? (just kidding, mom (I hope)). I suppose I could try to tidy the place up or something, but that sounds boring, and I hope my apartment isn't the highlight of their trip. Mostly I wanted to break out The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book again and take another shot at figuring out how people drank back in the days when even the hoboes wore suits. The “Cuban Concoctions” section particularly intrigues me; I imagine a Manhattan bar dropped into the tropics, posh sensibility creating new wonders with rum and exotic fruits. So with that in mind, I thought I'd begin at the beginning. The chapter starts with what was once the signature drink of Havana's Hotel National:

Equal parts of Bacardi and Pineapple Juice
Squeeze of Lemon
Dash of Apricot Brandy
Ice; shake; strain

So right away I'm faced with a problem. I thought I remembered seeing apricot brandy before, but I was apparently mistaken. I guess I'll have to visit one of those places with “warehouse” in the name sometime. The closest I could find was De Kuyper's “Apricot flavored brandy,” which I suspect isn't quite what they had in mind at the turn of the century. The De Kuyper's, rather than being a distillation of fermented apricots, is an apricot infusion mixed with actual brandy and some other things, creating something that tastes almost like a very sweet, apricotty vermouth. The brand is also a bit low-rent as far as liqueurs go, but it's probably close enough for the purposes of this experiment. I don't know how they rolled in 1908, whether the apricot brandies available back then included the bitter pits, but as far as I can tell from the Internet the brandies sold today don't, so I'll assume that the only goal in this recipe is a little hint of sweet apricot flavor. The stuff with the picture of apricots on the bottle will do.

I mixed this drink with two jiggers each of rum and pineapple, a quarter lemon's worth of juice and a little of the apricot brandy. And it tasted like pineapple. It was like a really boring tiki drink; I used light rum, so I don't expect much flavor from that front, but the lemon and apricot were completely overwhelmed by that prickly fruit, making little more than a hard glass of juice. The original recipe calls for the cocktail to be strained into a tall glass, but without ice in this glass I noticed a second problem: I don't really like warm pineapple juice. But I still have faith in this idea. The basic concept of the cocktail is to find the balance between three of the world's essential flavors—sweet, bitter and boozy—and with some slight modifications I think I found something that better walks this line. A little less pineapple, a little more lemon and a dash of bitters made for something much more interesting. It perhaps wanders closer to a daiquiri as the pineapple gives way to the sour of the lemon, but the pineapple lends a new flavor not imagined in the syruped original, and the bitters offer a new thought entirely, creating something that feels like a martini for the beach. I retained the shaking, since I like how the shaken pineapple juice creates a creamy froth, but I poured the final result over more ice rather than into an empty glass. So with all of that in mind, I present to you the Embargo:

2 jiggers Bacardi
1 jigger pineapple juice
juice of half a lemon
dash Angostura
dash apricot brandy
ice, shake, strain into glass of ice

This drink is considerably less sweet than the National above, but I like to think that addition of the famed Trinidadian tincture is still in keeping with the tropical traditions. It's something that stimulates the mind and soothes the soul. The pink bitters also create a drink that looks more like grapefruit juice than the simple yellow of the original, but I don't think that's such a bad change.

Skimming through some of the other recipes in the Waldorf-Astoria book, there seems to be no definite theme for Cuba. The drinks seem to follow the forms of the most basic of the early cocktails: mostly mixtures of varying amounts of vermouth, but with Bacardi instead of gin or bourbon. An orange or a lime appear here and there, but overall it feels like these are northern cocktails given a hasty island panache. I don't know when exactly the Hotel National opened, but I suspect it was sometime after Cuba's independence from Spain, so perhaps there wasn't enough time in Cuba Libre before these recipes were collected to create new drinks appropriate to the local culture and ingredients. Or maybe the Mafia is to blame; I can't recall that part of The Godfather Part II.

One of the few cocktails in this collection that survives today, the mojito, receives barely a mention, despite being one of the tastier libations passed down from that time. Perhaps I'll start with mint next time.